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Ask HN: Microsoft Computer Vision API or Google Cloud Vision API?

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Re: Ask HN: Microsoft Computer Vision API or Google Cloud Vision API?

#41

Post by obmelvin »

Negative1 wrote: post #26
wstrange wrote: post #6

Interesting looking at Google's Vision API overview, where they explicitly state that facial recognition is not available. The technology to do this clearly exists, but I gather they are concerned about the potential for abuse. Which makes sense. You could build some very creepy apps with this.

I won't directly speculate but I doubt the Face Detection functionality is absent due to some ethical quandary.

Why do you say that? http://megaface.cs.washington.edu/results/ shows that Google has one of the best Face Detection models.

Re: Ask HN: Microsoft Computer Vision API or Google Cloud Vision API?

#42

Post by obmelvin »

IshKebab wrote: post #15
kevinSuttle wrote: post #8

What about Watson? http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl...

I don't know about face recognition but I've quantatively analysed their speech recognition and it came dead last after the 5 or so others that I tested.

I know others have asked, but I'd also be interested in that ASR analysis. I'm working on something for my masters involving crowd sourced transcribers and we have access to Watson's ASR, which the (non CS) administration likes, but I've suspected its crap and would be cool to have some data.

Re: Ask HN: Microsoft Computer Vision API or Google Cloud Vision API?

#43

Post by mitbal »

I have tried both some time ago for an OCR task. In my brief experience, GCV performs better than Microsoft. Also last time I tried, I sometimes randomly get server error from Microsoft, so I guess Google infrastructure is more ready. The downside is GCV is a bit pricier. Also both do not provide parameter to set language models, so that's a minus in my eyes.

Re: Ask HN: Microsoft Computer Vision API or Google Cloud Vision API?

#44

Post by beagle3 »

megalodon wrote: post #16
beagle3 wrote: post #13

I'm interested in good OCR, preferably local, but I'm close to giving up and using Google Cloud Vision API --- It works well for text that's not prefectly aligned and laid out - unlike e.g. Tesseract or any other local OCR I've used. As far as I can tell, clarifai.com doesn't have OCR, and neither does anyone else except MS and G.

Hey, I made this [1]. Based on a neural net trained with generated character sets with intentional distortions and/or several font variations. I would not recommend it for use in production, but maybe you're interested in looking at the code and customizing it to your liking. Could perhaps be combined with OpenCV. [1] https://github.com/mateogianolio/ocr

Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: Microsoft Computer Vision API or Google Cloud Vision API?

#45

Post by kognate »

jharohit wrote: post #38
jwp729 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you tried the Watson vision offering when it was "AlchemyVision" then you may have tried a now out-of-date version of the service. The AlchemyVision and Visual Recognition tiles on Bluemix have recently been combined in a way that utilizes their complementary strengths. Consider retrying the updated service if you'd like! Disclosure: I work at IBM Watson.

ok - my bad. I just saw the AlchemyVision has been merged into Visual Recognition starting May 20th. We will definitely check it out to see what extra features have been added. qq - Is the API stabalized, by which I mean will there be further changes/merges?

The API has stabilized. There will be future changes, and I would expect to see those as the service gets new features added (like retraining).

Re: Ask HN: Microsoft Computer Vision API or Google Cloud Vision API?

#46

Post by matt_ny »

jharohit wrote: post #4
NEDM64 wrote: post #2

I think Microsoft's works better, try also IBM's if you can.

So I tried Microsoft's CV & IBM's AlchemyVision on the same image (since they both have an online demo sandbox). The Microsoft just gave me back more labels and stronger sentiment figures for same labels. Hence narrowed it down to these 2.

May 20 the AlchemyVision and Watson Visual Recognition Beta services merged into Watson Visual Recognition - http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl...

We're continually improving them (as everyone in computer vision is!) but for now one key feature of Watson Vision is the ability to train a custom classifier for your own data by just giving a bunch of example images. The service also provides general image tagging, text extraction(beta), face detection and a fixed list people for celebrity facial recognition.

We see this as a green-field area where rapid progress is being made across the board... I wouldn't count anyone out yet!

Re: Ask HN: Microsoft Computer Vision API or Google Cloud Vision API?

#47

Post by ryangal_msft »

wcrichton wrote: post #37
danielmorozoff wrote: post #36

It really depends what you are attempting to accomplish, and what you wish to detect in the images. As you mentioned faces: Are you looking for face detection or recognition? Face detection has been robustly solved before the advent of DL with HAARs/ face models. Now being pushed a bit further with DL. ( http://docs.opencv.org/master/d7/d8b/tutorial_py_face_detect... ) Current cutting edge face recognition systems re…

Note from personal experience: Haar cascades only work really well on frontal faces in high quality and good light. It sounds like OP has these kinds of photos so it will work well, but if you want to detect faces in any other kind of image/video, you'll need something more powerful. I still haven't found anything that works well.

You may want to check out the face detection approach described in this paper: Joint Cascade Face Detection and Alignment. ECCV 2014(http://www.jiansun.org/papers/ECCV14_JointCascade.pdf)

I'd also encourage you to try out the Face API from Microsoft (full disclosure, I work on it). One of the focuses is on improving detection when challenging lighting and occlusions are present: https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services/en-us/face-api

Re: Ask HN: Microsoft Computer Vision API or Google Cloud Vision API?

#48

Post by danielmorozoff »

ryangal_msft wrote: post #47
wcrichton wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note from personal experience: Haar cascades only work really well on frontal faces in high quality and good light. It sounds like OP has these kinds of photos so it will work well, but if you want to detect faces in any other kind of image/video, you'll need something more powerful. I still haven't found anything that works well.

You may want to check out the face detection approach described in this paper: Joint Cascade Face Detection and Alignment. ECCV 2014( http://www.jiansun.org/papers/ECCV14_JointCascade.pdf ) I'd also encourage you to try out the Face API from Microsoft (full disclosure, I work on it). One of the focuses is on improving detection when challenging lighting and occlusions are present: https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-…

Very interesting paper. Thank you for sharing it.

I had a question after reading it. The parameter rho, that is used to either classify/regress depending on the t cascade stage{1..T}, is said to be set empirically. This, I would assume, could change across data sets, how were you able to decide when classification switched to regression in your tree and how was this adapted when testing on other data?

Also forgot to attach the paper I was referring to: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.02766v3.pdf

Re: Ask HN: Microsoft Computer Vision API or Google Cloud Vision API?

#49

Post by jharohit »

buro9 wrote: post #5

http://www.clarifai.com/ Pricing is more friendly than the other two. The API is nice. I did like Google's a lot, but the price just wasn't there for me. Especially if you want most processing options. Microsoft have been in this game a lot longer, but surpisingly a lot of their cool stuff isn't in their APIs. i.e. ability to spot similar images and seamlessly stitch them. This stuff was in their maps products a long…

Thanks for the suggestion. Tried Clarifai's demo - their API & Pricing is nice as you said but they just don't have much to offer in terms of labels and feature detection when you compare to what Microsoft's or Google's version has to offer. Plus, they also don't seem to offer confidence numbers for labels

Re: Ask HN: Microsoft Computer Vision API or Google Cloud Vision API?

#50

Post by jasonnovack »

jharohit wrote: post #49
buro9 wrote: post #5

http://www.clarifai.com/ Pricing is more friendly than the other two. The API is nice. I did like Google's a lot, but the price just wasn't there for me. Especially if you want most processing options. Microsoft have been in this game a lot longer, but surpisingly a lot of their cool stuff isn't in their APIs. i.e. ability to spot similar images and seamlessly stitch them. This stuff was in their maps products a long…

Thanks for the suggestion. Tried Clarifai's demo - their API & Pricing is nice as you said but they just don't have much to offer in terms of labels and feature detection when you compare to what Microsoft's or Google's version has to offer. Plus, they also don't seem to offer confidence numbers for labels

Disclosure: I work at Clarifai.

Thanks for checking us out! Our demo may not fully represent what we have to offer, but you can see a sample response here with confidence numbers included (we call them probs): https://developer.clarifai.com/guide/tag#tag

In terms of labels, our "general" model has over 11,000 labels, and we also have specialized models with labels tailored for other purposes, including NSFW, travel, and food, among others.

Hope this helps

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