Google Cloud Vision API gives your applications sight

Developers can now give their applications sight, for pennies a picture, thanks to Google Cloud Vision API.

The API, now in a public Beta, offers developers a programatic way to gauge everything from what's going on in an image to the sentiment of people pictured (are those marathoners happy?).

It also lets you flag images for inappropriate content and extract text via Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

The news was announced in a blog post.

The service is one of a number of offerings (like IBM's Alchemy Vision) that are tapping the power of machine learning to help make images more readable by programs.