The world's first commercial quantum computer strutted its stuff in Reno, Nevada at the SC07 supercomputing conference. D-Wave Systems Inc. collaborated with Google to demonstrate how quantum computers can perform image recognition tasks at speeds rivalling human capabilities. The Neven-based image recognition and search-by-image capability was acquired by Google when it bought Neven Vision in 2006.
"Our image-matching demonstration, the core of which is too difficult for traditional computers, can automatically extract information from photos?recognising whether photos contain people, places or things?and then categorise the image elements by visual similarity," said Geordie Rose, D-Wave founder and CEO.
Google acquired Neven Vision for its expertise in recognising similarities among photos. Among the image-recognition tasks, the simplest would include determining whether a photo contains a person; the most complex would be accurate classification of images by person, place and thing. Even after tuning the algorithms so that they sidestepped the most difficult image-recognition problems, however, they remained too slow for practical deployment in the Google application.
"We have been collaborating with Hartmut Neven, founder of Neven Vision, since Google acquired it," said Rose. "Neven's original algorithms had to make many compromises on how they did things, since ordinary computers can't do things the way the brain does. But we believe that our quantum computer algorithms are not all that different from the way the brain solves image-matching problems, so we were able to simplify Neven's algorithms and get superior results."
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