Have you ever seen a photo of your pet and thought: “wow, it's like a work of art”? What if I told you that, in part, you are right? Google has proposed to find the double in painting of your dog, cat, bird, reptile, horse, etc. through a new feature Google Arts & Culture , its cultural application available on iOS and Android.
The new mode, called 'Pet Portraits', works in a similar way to the 'Art Selfie' feature that the company introduced a few years ago, where it allowed to find the artistic double of a person through a photo of a person's face. In this case, Google Arts & Culture uses a machine learning system to find matches between “tens of thousands of works from institutions around the world” where animals appear. To do this, it is based on the position, colors, face shapes or breed of our pet and compares them among all the possible variations.
This function is integrated into the Google Arts & Culture application, which is available for free on Google Play (Android) and the App Store (iPhone). The new pet portrait mode appears in the main area of the app, and using it is as simple as pressing the button that appears in the central area of the screen, take a picture of your dog, cat, bird, reptile, horse or other pet , and wait for Google to display the results.
Google Arts & Culture Pet Detection
I have never thought about finding out what would be the artistic or historical double of Ñuc, my German shepherd, but as soon as I installed the new update of Google Arts & Culture, I ran to find him to take a picture. Using the app is extremely simple, and a simple snapshot is enough for the system to start looking for matches, although it is also possible to select an image from the gallery . An interesting detail is that the application is capable of detecting the pet in the photo and automatically centering it. Therefore, it is not necessary to trim it beforehand.
Once the image is selected, the company's AI quickly searches through the different works found in the Google Arts & Culture database. Results are displayed as a card with a percentage indicating the level of match.
My dog is a painting
Google Arts & Culture believes that Lucky, my pet, is a feline. Now, how good are the Google Arts & Culture pet detection results? On many occasions it looks for results similar to the breed, colors or type of coat. In others, on the other hand, it shows the same type of animal – not necessarily of the same breed – with a position similar to that of our pet or even a face or similar expressions . I recommend, yes, that the image shows the face of the pet. Otherwise, the Google algorithm can mistake, for example, a dog with long hair for any other animal.
Google, on the other hand, allows to know more details about the painting , sculpture or historical photograph. For example, Wildebeest, my pet, has a 73% match with one of the royal dogs. The image, in particular, belongs to a poster exhibited in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
