Baidu, China's popular search engine giant, confessed to have cheated in an image recognition contest, after which it claimed to beat Google and Microsoft in terms of popularity, early in May.

In what could come across as a shocking news for ardent technology followers, a researcher from Baidu, China's leading internet search engine, admitted to resorting to cheating in an image recognition contest.

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According to Want China Times, the image recognition test was conducted in May and Baidu is said to have beaten Microsoft and Google in the race; however, recently, the researcher from Baidu confessed to cheating and even apologized for his inappropriate conduct. A few weeks ago in mind-May, Baidu was prompt to announce that its home-grown computer Minwa had excellent super-computing abilities and had successfully beaten Google and Microsoft in the image recognition test. The test, known as the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC), was conducted by the world's leading image database designer ImageNet. Baidu's super computer topped the charts with an impressive error rate of 4.58 percent, as compared to Microsoft's 4.94 percent and Google's 4.8 percent, respectively.

However, just last week on June 2, ImageNet made an announcement regarding Baidu saying the Chinese company had broken rules to win the contest and this is when the cheating episode was highlighted, which was also confirmed by Shanghai IST.

The controversy arose when ImageNet said that Baidu had successfully posted 40 results with 30 different accounts in just five days. This was a bigger number as compared to the permissible attempts of two results every week. Thanks to the intense testing, Baidu scientists were able to make more progress as compared to the other participants.

Meanwhile, ImageNet said that it had forbidden Baidu from submitting new results for the next twelve months. So far, there has been no official statement from the company authorities, but a certain We Ren, based in Baidu's research wing, was quick to apologize for the cheating episode on the ImageNet website. 

Additionally, he also said that Baidu would continue to review results in order to update itself with the latest developments.

TagsChina tech news, China Baidu news, image recognition contest