IssueTracker

Hello,

I've been trying to use the Cloud Vision API's Web Detection feature to perform programmatic reverse image searches over Google's image index. I greatly appreciate all the work your team has done to make this index accessible to the public. Unfortunately, the API results do not seem to be ordered by similarity to the input image as expected.

I've attached example results for this image.

You'll notice that 6/10 of the first full_matching_images do not match the input image, but many of the partial_matching_images are exact duplicates or crops of the input image. The pages_with_matching_images response field returns the results in an entirely different order and lists incorrect matches first.

It would be great if the Web Detection results returned a similarity score for each match, or if the results were sorted by decreasing similarity to the input, or if the result ordering algorithm was documented or described.

As a side note, a Google Lens search for the same image orders results by decreasing similarity and displays full matches first. There are also many more correct results retrieved. Are there any plans to migrate the Cloud Vision Web Detection API to use the Lens backend? It would be great if Lens were accessible via an official Cloud API.

Thank you and best regards.