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Google Cloud Vision API changes the way applications understand images

googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com

21–30 of 76 posts

Re: Google Cloud Vision API changes the way applications understand images

#21
post #18
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sort of how the old captcha helped digitize books, people entering recaptchas is free tagging to train vision's net.

Which is why the data from ReCaptcha and NoCaptcha should be public domain – it was created by society, it should be usable by society.

If the data was public the black hats would use the ReCaptcha and NoCaptcha data to defeat *Captcha and we'd be back to Square 1.

Re: Google Cloud Vision API changes the way applications understand images

#22
post #21
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why the data from ReCaptcha and NoCaptcha should be public domain – it was created by society, it should be usable by society.

If the data was public the black hats would use the ReCaptcha and NoCaptcha data to defeat *Captcha and we'd be back to Square 1.

The black hats have far easier way to use it.

But this data shouldn’t belong to a corporation.

It’s inacceptable that Google has the ability to use this dataset, their market monopoly in this online market, as competitive advantage in the self-driving car market.

Btw, black hats have no demand at all for captcha-solving solutions by training captcha solvers – instead, hiring people from Bangladesh is far cheaper and faster.

Re: Google Cloud Vision API changes the way applications understand images

#23
post #5

I wonder what this means for computer vision startups like http://clarifai.com ? Its hard to compete with Google on a task like image classification when Google has immense computational resources, tons of data, and hoards of top researchers.

They won't be the only ones with this tech forever. In so much as a solution depends on "cleverness" rather than raw computing power, it'll have room for competition. They put a lot of effort figuring out what works and what doesn't but now that they have a product, the lesson is out and will be recreated by others. Google is leading, but they have also shown the direction to go and provided something to benchmark against.

Re: Google Cloud Vision API changes the way applications understand images

#24
post #16
post #5

I wonder what this means for computer vision startups like http://clarifai.com ? Its hard to compete with Google on a task like image classification when Google has immense computational resources, tons of data, and hoards of top researchers.

Forget new services, even a small change in their existing products by Google can destroy lot of companies. Everyone remembers how they ruined email marketing by caching gmail images.

While this is a great example of monopoly done right and I'm very happy they did so, it is also a lesson about being too dependent on third party solutions.

Re: Google Cloud Vision API changes the way applications understand images

#25
post #10

It's exciting to see more of these services come to market. IBM Watson has a suite of vision APIs available that have some similar features. For example, the demo at http://vision.alchemy.ai/#demo has example images that demonstrate facial detection and identification, label extraction, object identification, and so on. Another demo at http://visual-insights-demo.mybluemix.net/ uses the Visual Insights [1] API to ide…

I would be interested in seeing a comparison - how the different vision APIs react to the same 10-15 images.

It would be very interesting if the two looped together, each using the other as a reference to improve their own parameters ;).

Re: Google Cloud Vision API changes the way applications understand images

#26
post #16
post #5

I wonder what this means for computer vision startups like http://clarifai.com ? Its hard to compete with Google on a task like image classification when Google has immense computational resources, tons of data, and hoards of top researchers.

Forget new services, even a small change in their existing products by Google can destroy lot of companies. Everyone remembers how they ruined email marketing by caching gmail images.

It was arguably a net-win for user privacy. Admittedly - it doesn't hurt Google to weaken other marketing channels but it's disingenuous to frame it this way without also pointing out that it's a lot more user-friendly than 'images in this email are blocked. click to enable'.

Re: Google Cloud Vision API changes the way applications understand images

#27
post #26
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget new services, even a small change in their existing products by Google can destroy lot of companies. Everyone remembers how they ruined email marketing by caching gmail images.

It was arguably a net-win for user privacy. Admittedly - it doesn't hurt Google to weaken other marketing channels but it's disingenuous to frame it this way without also pointing out that it's a lot more user-friendly than 'images in this email are blocked. click to enable'.

Similarly to https://xkcd.com/1172/, every change breaks someone's business model.

Re: Google Cloud Vision API changes the way applications understand images

#28
post #20

Great! The recognition seems fairly accurate, based on the examples they provided (haven't used Google Photos myself much, though). I'm still wary, though; I really hope we won't see a repeat of the labeling black people as gorillas fiasco, which happened as recently as earlier this year: http://mashable.com/2015/07/01/google-photos-black-people-go... . The article mentions that Google was looking into how these mist…

They likely didn't purposefully "do" anything wrong -- at least in the sense of some racist engineer tampering with the system to have it come out with those results. But this is the nature of machine learning algorithms, including both the process of supervision and ability to view the impact feedbacks have on the algorithms, and also, the impact the quality of the training set given to the algorithms. At a lesser c…

I have no doubt that neither Google nor HP made those error maliciously. I was just curious as to whether or not it's possible to incorporate some sort of... tact?... into these recognition algorithms to avoid labeling people (or other things) offensively. Is it just a matter of a larger training set? It would be hard to cover all sorts of people in all sorts of poses, with all sorts of lighting conditions, etc.

Re: Google Cloud Vision API changes the way applications understand images

#29
post #14
post #10

It's exciting to see more of these services come to market. IBM Watson has a suite of vision APIs available that have some similar features. For example, the demo at http://vision.alchemy.ai/#demo has example images that demonstrate facial detection and identification, label extraction, object identification, and so on. Another demo at http://visual-insights-demo.mybluemix.net/ uses the Visual Insights [1] API to ide…

Wow, that looks fantastic! I was looking like something like this for ages. Some feedback though: - As an independent developer, pricing is important to me. It was very difficult to find pricing for the Watson APIs (apparently it was in Bluemix?) and if I wasn't a little more determined (thanks to the ability to train my own classifier), I wouldn't have persevered. - If I already have a wealth of labelled data (I do)…

Thank you for the solid feedback!

As a work-around for mass uploading, I might suggest signing up for a 30 day free Bluemix trial [1]. You could then upload your data to a container and script the creation of sample archives and uploads from there.

[1]: https://console.ng.bluemix.net/registration/

Re: Google Cloud Vision API changes the way applications understand images

#30
post #5

I wonder what this means for computer vision startups like http://clarifai.com ? Its hard to compete with Google on a task like image classification when Google has immense computational resources, tons of data, and hoards of top researchers.

The solution for those startups may be to target more specific solutions and smaller niches instead of aiming for "general" classification and image tagging solutions.

Could be any kind of niche, from specific industries (utilities, media, transport...) to specific use cases (I don't have many in mind, one could be https://sightengine.com). Ideas welcome :)

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