What you need to know
- iOS 13 has a software feature called VNAnimalDetector that identifies cats or dogs.
- It will scan any image and if an animal is in it, it will categorize animal as dog or cat.
- The feature is available for developers to build into their apps.
Apple included a new feature into iOS 13 that will enable iPhones to analyze images of cats and dogs and properly identify them. The feature, first spotted by CNBC, is called VNAnimalDetector, and it works on any image involving either of those two pets.
The feature works by drawing a rectangle in any part of the image that contains the animal and then labels it accordingly. Unfortunately, the feature is only available for developers to build it into their apps.
Apple will surely incorporate it in someway to its own first-party apps. The Photos app can already distinguish cats and dogs and aptly place them in their own category.
It is part of Apple's Vision framework that creates developer tools for image recognition. This part of a bigger picture in which Apple is placing more emphasis in image recognition. Machine learning has grown in importance over the past few years and Apple is trying to do its part on the backend to keep its software up to par with what we're seeing from Google and other companies
Developers can access the feature through Apple's site to incorporate into their apps for iOS 13.
