Google Goggles' Eye for Art Just Got a Huge Help from The Met

Google Goggles is a great concept and a great technology, but the tool still isn't even close to the level it needs to be truly revolutionary. Image recognition is hard and progress is somewhat slow, but there are some areas where Google Goggles has always shined, with artworks for example.

Paintings in particular are an easy target for Goggles for a very simple reason, they're fairly easy to identify, no matter the angle of the photo, the lighting conditions, alternations to the original work and so on, and there's am ample amount of source images to compare the photos to.

Now Google is adding a huge amount of new artwork to its catalog, with the help of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Met provided Google with high resolution images of 76,000 artworks to use for Goggles and presumably its visual search features.

With high quality reference images, Goggles can do a much better job at helping people find out what is the artwork they've discovered on the streets, in a book and so on.

"We’ve teamed with the Metropolitan Museum of Art to bring their art collection to life in Google Goggles. We want art patrons to be able to bridge the physical art world with the online world in new, easy-to-use ways," Google announced.

"Google Goggles' image recognition abilities work both inside the Met where wireless is available (it’s expanding rapidly) and outside as well," it explained.

"The Met has provided us over 76,000 artwork images to index. Thousands of these aren’t on display at the moment -- so you can actually learn about works you won’t find in the galleries," it added.

This is just the first batch, the Met has over 340,000 works which will eventually make their way to Google to be included in Goggles.