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"Mobile video is shaky by definition," says Norman Winarsky, VP at SRI Ventures, part of Silcon Valley-based SRI International, a nonprofit performing sponsored R&D for governments, foundations and businesses. "A shaky image affects bandwidth and reduces the experience," he explains.

But with the technology Google has licensed from SRI, image stabilization will no longer be a concern ... at least on Android. Google is implementing the SRI tech in its Google Talk application, to deliver better video on Android 3.0+ devices. And that may be only the beginning of Google's computer vision plans.

Back in April, Google launched a new search feature in Labs that allowed users to find similar images.

Initially rolled out for select images only, the capability is now being rolled out for what seems to be the majority of images in Google image search. This is particularly useful when search terms include homonyms, we think; and we applaud Google for removing a major pain point in our searches for pics of Tesla the band as opposed to Tesla the scientist or Tesla the automotive brand.

You may not know it, but most of the images in Wikipedia are actually hosted on its sister project, Wikimedia Commons. If you find a favorite image on the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, click through and you'll quickly find yourself at its original page at the Commons project. With over 4.9 million freely-licensed media files, it's a treasure trove that supplies nearly all of the photos for Wikipedia.

Now you can annotate images from Wikimedia Commons in a fashion very similar to Flickr. The big difference with the new feature is that annotations can be added by anyone, and no account is necessary. While they don't show up directly in Wikipedia yet, a new version of the system that will appear in the free encyclopedia is under development.

This morning, Google announced that it will now display images next to some local search results. For the last two years, Google generally showed a map as the first item on the search results page whenever a user searched for a location, but now, a grid with six pictures will also appear next to this map as well. These images come right from the Panoramio photo layer in Google Maps, and clicking on it brings up Google Maps with the photo layer.