Quantum Computing has long been the fodder of science fiction, with the reality of it being far too bizarre and complicated to be the concern of mere mortals, but it seems the braniacs at Google and D-Wave have worked together to create a working prototype of an image detection algorithm that blows all existing algorithms out of the water.
In the search, Google first took 20,000 photographs — half with cars in them and without. In each picture they drew boxes around the cars (if there were any), identifying the “car” graphic element. Next Google took a second set of 20,000 photos — half with cars and half without. They then put the second set to the trained quantum search, which identified the cars faster than any traditional algorithm in Google's data farms.
So it does require a “training” cycle, but that’s a small price to pay if I can simply upload a few images of myself and then search the entire internet for more pictures of me. Plus with “big” search terms, crownsourcing would complete the training almost immediately.
via DailyTech – Google, D-Wave Team up to Unveil World’s First Quantum Image Search.
I doubt this supposed development has anything to do with quantum computing.
It is more probable that Google is employing one or a combination of the many advanced image/data classification, feature extraction and pattern recognition algorithms available. These have long been employed by the remote sensing and scientific image communities. The fact that 20000 images have to be used as a training set suggests a probabilistic classification algorithm is being used.