Google can now match your pets to famous portraits
What's the story
The Google Arts & Culture app was a rage in 2018 when it introduced a camera feature that compared your selfie to famous portraits and showed you the closest match. Now, thanks to advancements in machine learning (ML) technology, the app can find the art piece that most closely resembles your pets too, and we aren't limited to dogs and cats. Here's more.
Context
Why does it matter?
Until recently, ML algorithms have been trained to tell humans apart from inanimate objects and animals. Democratization of access to faster computation helped ML and artificial intelligence (AI) identify and compare human facial features with existing databases (in this instance, famous art) to find matches. However, pets challenge the technology because the identifying features aren't the same, even across two subspecies of a creature.
Now on iOS
Pet Portraits compares your pet's picture to thousands of artworks
On November 4, 9to5Google reported that updating to version 9.0.27 of the Google Arts & Culture app on Android enabled a new feature called "Pet Portraits". It allows you to photograph your pet and compare it to "thousands of historical artworks" using computer vision technology (a subset of ML). Now, the feature has been added to the iOS app too (version 9.0.29).
No restrictions
Pet Portraits works with birds and fish too
The "Pet Portraits" feature can find artwork with foxes, sheep, birds, and fish as well. Just like the human portraits feature that helped find your doppelgänger, artworks resembling your pet are ranked by percentage of similarity. The results can be viewed as swipeable stills or in a GIF slideshow. The similar-looking art can be saved and shared too.
Suit yourself
Google Arts & Culture app also offers other cool features
Engadget perused Google's example images for the new Pet Portraits feature and noted that the results are not accurate in every case. Besides that, Google's Arts & Culture app offers Art Projector to see the real size of artworks. You can also try Art filter to discover filters inspired by museum artifacts, and use Art Transfer to transform photos into classic art styles.