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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

#121

Post by riskable »

mchusma wrote: post #83

You lost me at "patent pending". This idea has been obvious and in progress for a while now with lots of prior work. The issue is more the standards. Please don't sell this to a patent troll who will harass the industry for 20 years.

> You lost me at "patent pending".

I had the same thought: As soon as I saw, "patent pending" I stopped reading. Not worth my time to learn about something that's going to be locked away. Talk to me in 18 years.

Patents on software and algorithms (aka "math") shouldn't even exist.

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

#122

Post by nonrandomstring »

jacobgorm wrote: post #85
UncleEntity wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 r…

There is a difference between doing well and becoming China in terms of surveillance. Most of our revenue were from just plain head counting and from tracking cars in a smart city project. The one face rec system we actually sold was used to measure waiting times in a retail setting, and replaced an existing system that was using AWS Rekognition in the same manner, except with all the video footage going to the cloud…

Thanks for your honest answers Jacob, and the good spirit to do so in public. This kind of discussion really helps with the topics I am researching (and btw if I mention this or anyone else from HN in the text it will always be in a non-identifying way). Good luck with your project.

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

#124

Post by atleta »

lmc wrote: post #108
mchusma wrote: post #83

You lost me at "patent pending". This idea has been obvious and in progress for a while now with lots of prior work. The issue is more the standards. Please don't sell this to a patent troll who will harass the industry for 20 years.

> This idea has been obvious and in progress for a while now with lots of prior work. Such as?

E.g.: "Neural Image Compression and Explanation" https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.08988

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

#126

Post by atleta »

mchusma wrote: post #83

You lost me at "patent pending". This idea has been obvious and in progress for a while now with lots of prior work. The issue is more the standards. Please don't sell this to a patent troll who will harass the industry for 20 years.

Yep, it's indeed a trivial idea. I'd say I probably seen it mentioned in the explanation of convnets: they compress the images more and more as you go deeper in the network (i.e. they extract the features).

Compression+decompression is basically what an autoencoder does. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoencoder .

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

#127

Post by Ventito »

jacobgorm wrote: post #97
nicr_22 wrote: post #92

Nice work, but you might find it's not super unique - video codec people have been thinking about how to apply face recognition ML tech to this use case for 5+ years. For instance, have you seen https://developer.nvidia.com/maxine ? They released some pretty nice demos 2 years ago.

Their approach is more heavy-weight as it uses GANs (IIRC) to dream up a reconstruction of your face. They need GPU VMs in the cloud, whereas mine runs on device.

I'm not sure if the original post is the same as this: https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-video-compression

As maxime can do more like live translation.

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

#128

Post by gfodor »

bambax wrote: post #48

> Because it uses face rec, you can ONLY show your face, and if you disappear from view your audio will stop after a while, to avoid situations like when you need to go the the restroom but forget to mute. Of course, the real killer app for Zoom calls is the opposite of this: some kind of deep fakery that makes it seem we're there when we're not. Yet as it is, this is a fantastic idea. It's surprising video codecs de…

I have a prototype thing that creates a virtual webcam and drives an avatar off of your microphone. It's not photorealistic, but it works.

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

#129

Post by londons_explore »

jacobgorm wrote: post #79
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.

Thinking about it... The obvious solution is to make every version support the current protocol and the previous protocol. You might sometimes have to downgrade a call sometimes if someone joins with an older client.

Then anyone can join any call unless they are 2 or more versions behind.

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

#130

Post by bambax »

gfodor wrote: post #128
bambax wrote: post #48

> Because it uses face rec, you can ONLY show your face, and if you disappear from view your audio will stop after a while, to avoid situations like when you need to go the the restroom but forget to mute. Of course, the real killer app for Zoom calls is the opposite of this: some kind of deep fakery that makes it seem we're there when we're not. Yet as it is, this is a fantastic idea. It's surprising video codecs de…

I have a prototype thing that creates a virtual webcam and drives an avatar off of your microphone. It's not photorealistic, but it works.

Please share!
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