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Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com

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Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#31

Post by cassidoo »

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…

If you want to be more comfortable with it, one really cool API you should check out is Clarifai (someone else already mentioned it in this thread, but I'll bring it up again anyway). They're really highly regarded in terms of classification, and the API is pretty simple to use, too. Like if you just make a quick cURL request:

  curl -H "Authorization: Bearer {access_token}" --data-urlencode "url=YOUR_IMAGE_URL.jpg"  "https://api.clarifai.com/v1/tag/"
...you get the top 20 tags for that image and their confidence levels, too. Their homepage at Clarifai.com has a pretty good demo that lets you see it in a more visual way.

Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#32

Post by teh »

abtinf wrote: post #27

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 broa…

Do you have pricing information available anywhere? All I can see is [1] but that's not really interesting. Compare with [2] which makes it quite easy to guess how much I'd pay.

[1] http://www.alchemyapi.com/products/contact-sales

[2] https://cloud.google.com/vision/pricing

Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#33

Post by chippy »

I couldn't find a specific legal SLA for this new service. Does anyone know if:

1) by using the service you grant Google use of the uploaded images. (e.g. they can use your image to increase their corpus, improve the service or use it for advertising, or use it to extract street numbers for their maps, or its always private and never stored)

2) What the resulting copyright is of the returned data. If you were to build a database based on the results, what license or copyright status this would be. Would all rights belong to me, or would Google claim rights over the results.

Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#34

Post by lallysingh »

jfoster wrote: post #30
lallysingh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So to avoid the copyright situation, I just mix in some random nonce data, infinitesimally small, to make it equivalent?

Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#35

Post by mikevin »

jrnkntl wrote: post #10

Just tried a couple of images with digits to test out the OCR w/ the TEXT_DETECTION setting, unfortunately it assumes what it reads is a defined language with words. I am looking into using this for digit-recognition and only digits, but that doesn't seem to be a use case (as it is now). Does anybody know of another service/API that can do reliable digits-only OCR on (not the finest clear quality) images?

Weird, their example at https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/cloud-vision/tree/mas... shows digits. Your best bet is probably ABBYY if you want something else.

Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#36

Post by squeaky-clean »

jfoster wrote: post #30
lallysingh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Well then your ex-lover clearly deserves co-songwriting credits. As well as their parents. And anybody who has influenced them personally, or even anyone who made the food that they've eaten. There's gotta be a point at which the original is just too far removed from the end result for it to be infringing, otherwise you could just keep going.

Also is a model that classifies things isn't the same as those things themselves, or images of those things, and would most I certainly hope it would be considered transformative enough to not be infringing (I am not a lawyer though). I could give it an image of a dog, and it will tell me what it thinks it is. But there doesn't seem to be any way for me to say "show me a dog" and get back any sort of image, infringing or not.

Some thought experiments: Let's say you have a copyrighted photo, and I design an API that allows anyone to upload a photo and get a true/false of whether or not it's the same file as your photo. Is this copyright infringement if I never release the original photo?

Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#37

Post by jfoster »

lallysingh wrote: post #34
jfoster wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So to avoid the copyright situation, I just mix in some random nonce data, infinitesimally small, to make it equivalent?

Maybe that fixes it. Maybe you don't even have to if the copyright question only ever remains theoretical. I have a feeling it might only be a matter of time until this question arises in a case, though.

Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#38

Post by jaxondu »

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…

By using this API, we're effectively training Google's system to be more and more accurate. Shouldn't Google pay us for using it? Just saying :-)

Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#39

Post by SEMW »

chippy wrote: post #33

I couldn't find a specific legal SLA for this new service. Does anyone know if: 1) by using the service you grant Google use of the uploaded images. (e.g. they can use your image to increase their corpus, improve the service or use it for advertising, or use it to extract street numbers for their maps, or its always private and never stored) 2) What the resulting copyright is of the returned data. If you were to buil…

If there's no service specific T&Cs for this, it falls under their general cloud T&Cs: https://cloud.google.com/terms/. s.5:

> 5.1 Intellectual Property Rights. Except as expressly set forth in this Agreement, this Agreement does not grant either party any rights, implied or otherwise, to the other’s content or any of the other’s intellectual property. As between the parties, Customer owns all Intellectual Property Rights in Customer Data and the Application or Project (if applicable), and Google owns all Intellectual Property Rights in the Services and Software.

> 5.2 Use of Customer Data. Google will not access or use Customer Data, except as necessary to provide the Services to Customer.

Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#40

Post by tommoor »

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…

Agreed, this is an exciting api but the pricing puts it out of reach for a lot of applications
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