A stock-photography marketplace wants to automatically generate a list of descriptive keywords for each uploaded photo, such as 'beach', 'sunset', and 'dog', so customers can find the photo through keyword search. The marketplace does not need to know where each object sits within the frame, only which concepts appear somewhere in the image. Which AI capability best fits this requirement?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Pay attention to what the marketplace explicitly says it does not need: it does not care where in the photo the dog is standing, only that a dog appears in the photo at all. That rules out any capability whose whole point is pinpointing location, since drawing a box around each object or labeling every pixel would be solving a harder problem than the one being asked. It also rules out reading text, since a sunset over a beach usually has no words in it to extract. What's left is the capability that looks at a photo as a whole and hands back a short list of the concepts present, which is exactly the searchable keyword list the marketplace wants to attach to each upload.
Full Explanation
The correct answer is D. Image classification and tagging is designed to look at an entire photo and return one or more descriptive labels for what it contains, matching the marketplace's need for keyword tags without any spatial information. Option A is incorrect because object detection would draw a bounding box around every dog or every umbrella instead of simply listing that a dog and an umbrella appear somewhere in the photo, which is more information than the marketplace asked for and a different output shape entirely. Option B is incorrect because image segmentation classifies every pixel in the photo, producing a detailed pixel map rather than a short list of searchable keywords, which is far more granular than the tagging use case requires. Option C is incorrect because optical character recognition reads printed or handwritten text within an image, such as a sign or label, but it does nothing to identify visual concepts like a beach or a sunset that contain no text at all. The marketplace's stated need, whole-image descriptive tags with no location data, points directly to image classification and tagging.