Tool Wolfram recognizes objects in photo

Wolfram, the company behind the ‘smart search engine’ Wolfram Alpha, has introduced a tool that should recognize what is in a photo. Developers can integrate the tool into their software to automatically categorize images, for example.

Users can upload their image to Wolfram’s Image Identification Project and the system will attempt to identify what is in the image. In many cases, the tool gets it right, though company founder Stephen Wolfram admits that some images aren’t properly classified. For example, an image of a cat in a spacesuit is labeled ‘human’.

The tool works with the help of machine learning: the company claims that the tool has analyzed tens of millions of images in order to distinguish objects from each other. Developers can use the tool to analyze images automatically; for example, large collections of images could be sorted in a short time.