Google has acquired Neven Vision and its image recognition technology, which will be incorporated into the Picasa photo organizer.
Information is available on Google’s Official Blog, in the form of a post from Adrian Graham, Picasa Product Manager. Terms of the acquisition, however, are not available.
Neven Vision’s technology enables sophisticated recognition of objects in images. Graham discussed this in his post:
Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects. This technology just may make it a lot easier for you to organize and find the photos you care about.
Google isn’t ready to talk about their plans for Neven and Picasa, other than Graham’s observation that they and Neven Vision share the goal of making photo searches easier for people to do.
The purchase probably lays to rest any chance that Google will purchase Riya, a startup with a focus in facial recognition technology. Last year, it was rumored briefly that Google would acquire Riya for possibly as much as $30 million, but time passed without the deal taking place.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
