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Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com

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Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#21

Post by joshvm »

onli wrote: post #5
jfoster wrote: post #3

I feel like this is some really compelling tech. It would be so amazing to build stuff with this in mind. I wouldn't be comfortable doing it, though. This sort of API is available only until Google decide that they don't want it to be available. There's not really anything close to equivalent that you could drop in to replace it if it were being shut down, the price were being hiked, or you had some sort of other iss…

There actually are other APIs, though with a smaller scope. For text extraction for example there is the OnDemand Api, https://dev.havenondemand.com/apis/ocrdocument#overview , backed by HP. They also have logo detection. I'd be surprised if no replacement for the category detection exists. Though I admit I also hesitate to replace that API with the google offering for the one app where I actually use it. The results…

Clarifai are quite a big name in the classification field and that's pretty much all their API does.

Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#22

Post by BookmarkSaver »

eurekin wrote: post #20
netinstructions wrote: post #7

I was looking into label detection APIs (and Google's offerings as well) for a silly game/website I was thinking of writing, but $5 per 1000 images is way too steep, especially if each user is submitting 1-5 images per interaction with the website. The $2 per 1000 images price they mention on the blog post is only if you're doing 5+ million images a month. I played with IBM Watson visual recognition API and it didn't…

I wrote once document detection library. It was supposed to recognize corners of a printout in a photo. Is that close? EDIT: you could send me example images and what you need from them. I could check how much I would need to extend it to handle your case.

Detecting boundaries and straight lines is something that has been "easily" done for a while now. Categorizing complex images (such as differentiating between a cat and a dog) is still extremely difficult for computers. I'm not really surprised that Watson couldn't do it, I've only recently started hearing about preliminary breakthroughs in the feasibility of this sort of tech.

Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#23

Post by jfoster »

I don't know for certain, but I suspect that Google utilized images from the web in training this system. Even if they didn't, suppose they had. I think this can raise an interesting question around copyright.

In training an AI system with hundreds/thousands of bits of data, no single piece of training data makes much of a difference. If one of my images on the web that I had captioned with the keyword 'dog' was used to train this system about what a dog looks like, is the model they end up with a derivative work of my captioned image? Yes, but my data would make up an infinitesimally small part of that model. Yet, in aggregate, the trained model might almost wholly rely on lots of copyrighted, rights-reserved images.

Would the resulting model be a copyright infringement? It would seem as though no rights owner would have a substantial enough claim. Yet, without all of the copyrighted works, perhaps the model would be ineffective.

Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#24

Post by mayank »

Interesting that this is released in source closed, API-only form, rather than the open-code model taken by TensorFlow. I wonder how far you could approximate the model by training a learner on the API responses.

Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#25

Post by lallysingh »

jfoster wrote: post #23

I don't know for certain, but I suspect that Google utilized images from the web in training this system. Even if they didn't, suppose they had. I think this can raise an interesting question around copyright. In training an AI system with hundreds/thousands of bits of data, no single piece of training data makes much of a difference. If one of my images on the web that I had captioned with the keyword 'dog' was used…

I donno. If I'm composing music, and I heard your music before that, is my music implicitly derived? Your music certainly had some infinitesimal affect on me.

Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#26

Post by jfoster »

legohead wrote: post #19
jfoster wrote: post #3

I feel like this is some really compelling tech. It would be so amazing to build stuff with this in mind. I wouldn't be comfortable doing it, though. This sort of API is available only until Google decide that they don't want it to be available. There's not really anything close to equivalent that you could drop in to replace it if it were being shut down, the price were being hiked, or you had some sort of other iss…

I have all kinds of product ideas from this API, but have the same fears as you.. can't rely on an API. So for now, my best idea is to use it to build something fun with my kids. If only Google would adopt some sort of policy where they would let you download the dataset+code when they shut something off...

Yeah, if they could make some sort of commitment to open it up in the event that they no longer want to run it, problem solved. (mostly, at least; pricing adjustments could still be disruptive for certain applications)

Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#27

Post by abtinf »

Disclosure: I am an evangelist for the Watson Developer Cloud suite of services at IBM.

The new wave of vision services are amazing. There are a lot of players in this field, including IBM Watson, which has a suite of vision APIs available with similar features.

One key differentiator of the Watson offering is that we have a trainable API called Visual Recognition [2]. The pre-trained APIs are excellent and have broad uses, but it's amazing to see the results from even basic training to identify image tags directly relevant to your use case. There is a demo [3] that allows you to try it out by creating a new classifier right in the web page.

You can find some demos at:

http://vision.alchemy.ai/#demo - 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 identify a set of relevant tags.

[1]: https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developerc...

[2]: https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developerc...

[3]: https://visual-recognition-demo.mybluemix.net/

Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#28

Post by ig1 »

If the OCR is good then they're totally burying the lede, it's pricing is 100x cheaper than commercial OCR APIs.

It's potentially a game changer, plenty of industries have piles of scanned documents. Cheap OCR means this data suddenly becomes accessible even if the value per individual document is low (i.e. for input into machine learning).

Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#29

Post by brianwawok »

jfoster wrote: post #23

I don't know for certain, but I suspect that Google utilized images from the web in training this system. Even if they didn't, suppose they had. I think this can raise an interesting question around copyright. In training an AI system with hundreds/thousands of bits of data, no single piece of training data makes much of a difference. If one of my images on the web that I had captioned with the keyword 'dog' was used…

So people trained google images that Comcast = nazi flag. I guess we need to send in an OCR of a nazi flag and see if it comes back Comcast?

Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#30

Post by jfoster »

lallysingh wrote: post #25
jfoster wrote: post #23

I don't know for certain, but I suspect that Google utilized images from the web in training this system. Even if they didn't, suppose they had. I think this can raise an interesting question around copyright. In training an AI system with hundreds/thousands of bits of data, no single piece of training data makes much of a difference. If one of my images on the web that I had captioned with the keyword 'dog' was used…

I donno. If I'm composing music, and I heard your music before that, is my music implicitly derived? Your music certainly had some infinitesimal affect on me.

Absolutely, but any music you compose probably also has an element of originality in it, or at least draws inspiration from something that is non-musical in nature. For a trained AI, the entire model is just a derivative work of all the training data. It's not as though the AI had a lover who left them and drew inspiration from that experience to become a more effective AI.
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