As a way of boosting the capabilities of the research community, Google research scientists and software engineers often develop state-of-the-art models and make them available to the public instead of keeping them proprietary. As described in the Google research blog post, https://research.googleblog.com/2017/06/supercharge-your-computer-vision-models.html , on October 2016, Google's in-house object detection system placed first in the COCO detection challenge, which is focused on finding objects in images (estimating the chance that an object is in this position) and their bounding boxes (you can read the technical details of their solution at https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.10012).
The Google solution has not only contributed to quite a few papers and been put to work in some Google products (Nest Cam - https://nest.com/cameras/nest-aware...