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Show HN: I turned my face rec system into a video codec

vertigo.ai

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Re: Show HN: I turned my face rec system into a video codec

#71

Post by mateo1 »

ricochet11 wrote: post #54

this is really smart, one of those ideas that seems so obvious but i'd have never thought of it. i think the content moderation angle is pretty interesting to expand upon, a lot of livestream platforms have "if x is detected stop the stream" but this idea of make it impossible to show x in the first place would be much cheaper if it can be expanded enough for the relevant domains.

I believe that algorithms reconstructing your face or part if it (ie facial expressions) are already in use, it's just not advertised.

Re: Show HN: I turned my face rec system into a video codec

#73

Post by andai »

Tried it out on my phone, app crashes every time I press "go to room". I'm using iPhone SE from 2016 so maybe my phone is too old for the GPU features? Alas! Was looking forward to trying it.

As a side note the UI looks like a toy or joke app. I'm not sure what market you're going for (it seems like a general purpose video chat app?) but you might want to reconsider the aesthetic.

Re: Show HN: I turned my face rec system into a video codec

#74

Post by sitkack »

danuker wrote: post #56
gnramires wrote: post #46

Awesome! A thought: now that neural compression is becoming widespread, it could be a good idea to put some kind of indicator or watermark stating the compression is neural (learned/function approximation in general). I think this would avoid liabilities and criticism around the fact that some weird things may appear (incorrect detail generation), maybe giving a wrong semantic idea. It may also be a good idea to put…

> incorrect detail generation Absolutely. Reminds me of Xerox number mangling: https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...

Or when AI resolution enhancement inserts Ryan Goslings face.

https://petapixel.com/2020/08/17/gigapixel-ai-accidentally-a...

Re: Show HN: I turned my face rec system into a video codec

#75

Post by mromanuk »

capableweb wrote: post #34
parentheses wrote: post #10

What’s funny is I’ve had this very idea but no AI skills or extra time to pull it off. Bravo!!

Yet another example that having ideas is worth close to 0, while being able to execute on your own or others ideas is worth > 0 :)

Yes. It's weird and forced when people tell you that ideas are super powerful, there is a good book "Made to stick" which is really cool. There's a section where they look at JFK's "get to the moon and back safely" as the driving force behind the whole thing. Thousands or millions before him, had the same idea, even the URSS was planning a trip. Even the travel is portrayed in a highly popular 1902 film. What set apart the moon landing of 1969 (by USA) was the execution.

Re: Show HN: I turned my face rec system into a video codec

#76

Post by jacobgorm »

vletal wrote: post #57

What about battery life on iPhones? Is the hardware utilised efficiently?

Most of the heavy lifting is done on the GPU, which runs at a lower clock rate and uses less energy than the CPU. The neural nets used are fairly light-weight. I think the power consumption is similar to a Zoom call.

Re: Show HN: I turned my face rec system into a video codec

#78

Post by UncleEntity »

jacobgorm wrote: post #38
UncleEntity wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You switched from street face surveillance (an arguably highly unethical application) to more intimate videoconferencing (a more humanistic and socially beneficial end). Or that makes it easier to identify individuals as they give consent to have their face ‘fingerprinted’ as part of the app’s EULA. If I were going to sell a mass-surveillance solution I’d certainly want to have the ability to identify individuals w…

Hi, we don't collect any data from the app, and have filled in the privacy etc. statements on the App Store accordingly. Ideally I would like to collect faces to train the compression on, in which case we would have to consult with lawyers to come up with an EULA allowing us to do this. The advantage compared to using broadly available datasets to train on would be more realistic shot noise, low light images, and so…

> We've been sitting on the face recognition tech since 2018, so if we'd wanted to become Clearview.ai we probably would have a long time ago.

It says right at the beginning of the post you were doing quite well until the pandemic shut down businesses.

I try not to be overly critical (I really do) but this is one of those cases I just can’t help myself, I see no reason individual businesses should be running facial recognition on their customers and am kind of wary of someone who would enable that. And cities adding it to their collection of public cameras is beyond wrong.

IDK, somewhere we, as a society, decided 1984 was an instruction manual and not a warning…

Re: Show HN: I turned my face rec system into a video codec

#79

Post by jacobgorm »

londons_explore wrote: post #62

How do you deal with network weights versioning? I assume the version that does the compressing and decompressing needs to match? And if you release an update and half the users install it, this is a problem? Do you have some mechanism to dynamically download and update weights to ensure that all users in a call at least have a common version of the network? Or will you just globally require all users to update befor…

Good question. The protocol is versioned, so you will be prompted to upgrade if/when I change the network doing the encoding/decoding. Downloading new weights on the fly should not be a problem (Apple would allow it as long as I don't change the code), but in many cases when evolving the protocol I've had to make changes to other parts of the code too, so not sure if it will be worthwhile.

Re: Show HN: I turned my face rec system into a video codec

#80

Post by jacobgorm »

bsenftner wrote: post #61

Very cool work. I'd love to sit down and talk with you, jacobgorm. I spent 7 years in FR after failing my startup working on Personalized Advertising, which was based on Automated Actor Replacement in Filmed Media. The VC/Angel world wanted the startup to pursue deep fake pornography, but I refused, and ultimately went bankrupt. However, I managed to globally patent the actor replacement technology, create an automat…

I'd love to talk. Could you ping me at jacob@vertigo.ai?
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