Did You Know You Could Do This?

This is pretty damned crazy! The intelligence Google’s once coaxed out of printed words is now transferred to images. Wow.

I follow Lance Ulanoff, editor at PCMag.com on Twitter. A few minutes ago he posted a photo and asked if anyone could identify it.

Can anyone out there identify what kind of jet this is? #flyby http://t.co/8CddjLz

That’s Lance’s mystery plane on the right.

It looked familiar, but I wasn’t sure. I headed to Google Images for some help. There’s a fairly new feature from Google that allows you to search for similar photos by entering an original or just the URL where a photo resides.

Google uses computer vision techniques to match your image to other images in the Google Images index and additional image collections. From those matches, we try to generate an accurate “best guess” text description of your image, as well as find other images that have the same content as your search image. Your search results page can show results for that text description as well as related images.

Here’s the result! Google’s fairly certain Lance was looking at an F/A-18 Hornet.

This is pretty damned crazy! The intelligence Google’s once coaxed out of printed words is now transferred to images. Wow.

9 thoughts on “Did You Know You Could Do This?”

  1. That is most certainly an F/A-18. Can tell despite the fact that I’m viewing this post via my crackberry. Same plane used by my favorite airshow team, the Blue Angels and also the same plane the host of this blog rode in some time ago… Not that I’m extremely jealous or anything! 😉

    -Mike

  2. well Geoff I think the Cyberdyne 2000 needs to have a decent visual recognition system to track down Sarah Conner no? 😉

    BUT

    yes this is friggen cool!

  3. Nope. I didn’t know that and I am on google all the time! That is really cool! I’ll try it out. 🙂

  4. I have been waiting for this for years! Thank you so much for letting us know. I had no idea they had achieved this yet.

  5. That is cool Geoff. However, my 11 year old son was able to correctly identify the plane within 10 seconds. He is obsessed with planes.

  6. Missed it by that much 😉 It’s an F/A-18 D Hornet. You can see the tailhook too if you look really closely. 🙂

  7. Jimbo, I actually think this is an F/A-18E (single seat) or F (two seat) Super Hornet, which are the latest versions and are still in production. Production of the D version stopped in 2000. Super Hornets have a 25% larger air frame than the original Hornets, better avionics, much more capable.

    1. Yup, it’s hard to make out clearly, but if you look closely the intakes appear to to be rectangular rather than rounded which would make it an F/A-18E or F.

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