In my last post, we examined the topics of artificial intelligence and machine learning in museums. Today, I’d like to continue this thread and focus on machine vision. It couldn’t be more timely, as Google recently announced their public beta of Cloud Vision API and it has us all dreaming of interesting ways that machine vision can be used to help museums.

What is machine vision?

Machine vision is the ability for a computer to understand what it is seeing.

Back in 2014, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, hosted a panel examining the “Cultural Impact of Computer Vision” from the eyes of artists. Today, let’s take a look from the perspective of museums.

Machine vision can be used to inspect and analyze images. Imagine being able to classify all of your visual objects with the flip of a switch (actually, a few lines of code).

Let’s take a look at a few examples!

1. Identifying Subject Matter

Machine vision has become advanced enough to detect the subject matter and objects depicted in an image. What is depicted in this painting, photo, video, or sculpture?

We put Google Vision API to the test with Canaletto’s The Grand Canal in Venice from Palazzo Flangini to Campo San Marcuola located at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.