Understanding ML Kit

ML Kit encompasses all the existing Google offerings for machine learning on mobile. It bundles the Google Cloud Vision API, TensorFlow Lite, and the Android Neural Networks API together in a single SDK, as shown:

ML Kit enables developers to utilize machine learning in their mobile applications for both Android and iOS apps, in a very easy way. Inference can be carried out by invoking APIs that are either on-device or on-cloud.

The advantages of on-device APIs are that they work completely offline, and are more secure as no data is sent to the cloud. By contrast, on-cloud APIs do require network connectivity, and do send data off-device, but allow for greater accuracy.

ML Kit offers APIs covering the following machine learning scenarios that may be required by mobile application developers:

• Image labeling
• Text recognition
• Landmark detection
• Face detection
• Barcode scanning 

All these APIs are implemented using complex machine learning algorithms. However, those details are wrapped...