Wiki Fiction: Photo-trained

Nov 12, 2020

Photo-trained

There are two "albums" in Google Photos that contain posters and book covers appearing in my wikifiction blog posts.

I've long been amazed at how bad the Google search engine is at finding sensible images when I do image searches. Three years ago I mentioned in a blog post that Google was trying to "crowd source" the task of using people to label and categorize images.

Today I was invited to help categorize some of the images that are in my albums. As shown in the image to the right, Google has tried to identify individual people and "things" that are in those albums. For example, their image recognition algorithm for faces does a good job of finding Isaac Asimov (below):

images of Asimov found on two covers

The Search for Gillian

Google is not nearly as good at recognizing Gillian Anderson. I long ago identified one of my images as containing Gillian, but during the past few years, Google's facial recognition system has incorrectly labeled many of my images as containing her.

However, today I noticed that Google Photos did offer me the chance to verify the images (there were about 70 of them) it had sorted into that sub-folder. Only about ten of the images actually included Gillian.

Can Google find Gillian? Google identified all 3 of these images as including Gillian.

Same or different?

I tried to go through the process of telling Google which images had been incorrectly categorized as containing Gillian.

blue spinning wheel

The first step in the process was a real road block; I waited 2 hours and thirty minutes with an endlessly spinning wheel. It took so long, I had to wonder if Google was searched through all of the images in my albums (about 800). I restarted the process and tried to "train" Google how to recognize Gillian, but as of now, there are still many misidentifications.

Images identified as "dancing" by Google.

Google had sorted a large number of my images into the category "posters". Most of those were actually book and magazine covers. Another amusing category is "dancing". What is their algorithm for detecting dance? If a woman is not standing like a statue or you can see arm or leg skin then she must be dancing?

Category: Moon

Google did good at identifying images of Earth's Moon as seen from Earth. I wonder if Google can read... if the word "moon" is in an image is that good enough? Sometimes Google can't tell the difference between Earth and the Moon or it assumes that images of Earth from space are being viewed from the Moon, even if they are not.

Mountains? All four of these images were flagged by Google as containing mountains.

Google batted about 0.500 in identifying mountains (see above). Some "things":

six Google "things"

Gillian or alien?

Male or female?

Some of the "people" in my albums are aliens. Google usually does a very good job recognizing those unusual "alien" faces, but in one case an alien was misidentified as Gillian (see the image to the right).

Sometimes Google can't even tell the difference between males and females (see the image to the left).

Nanorealm

Screenshots?

Musical theatre?

I recently made some unusual book covers that are meant to depict locations in the Hierion Domain, either Seelie, the realm of the synpaz replicoids, or Nanoville, the home of nanoscopic replicoids.