This is an image recognition service that is part of a suite of deep-learning services that Amazon has recently announced for developers. For the most part it does what most image recognition services do, which is to identify human faces, identify emotions, and label objects just by looking at it. In fact it seems to be smart enough to not only tell that a dog is in a photo, but the breed of the dog as well which is pretty specific.
According to Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels, “Amazon Rekognition democratizes the application of deep learning technique for detecting objects, scenes, concepts, and faces in your images, comparing faces between two images, and performing search functionality across millions of facial feature vectors that your business can store with Amazon Rekognition.”
As to who might be taking advantage of Amazon’s Rekognition service remains to be seen, as well as the various applications that it might be used for. However it is an alternative to some of the other products out there from the likes of other companies such as Google.