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

vertigo.ai

41–50 of 150 posts

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

#41

> is a new from-the-ground-up patent pending What is the invention? The models are just complex mathematical formulas and these cannot be patented.

If that were the case, Google would not own a patent on PageRank and we wouldn't have to bother with open source audio/video codecs.

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

#42
This reminds me of an idea I had about 15 years ago but never pursued. The concept was using basic object detection as an input as a first pass to to a standard video codec to guide where it should spend it's data budget. So, for example, a TV news broadcast could put more details on the host's eyes and mouth while a parking garage camera would be trained to get clearer number plates.

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

#43

Very cool. Out of curiosity, why is the H.265 size slightly more than the H.264 size? How does the compute complexity for encoding and decoding compare with those two codecs?

I got these results by using Vertigo's bitrate as the target, and squeezing the other ones until they got as close as possible to that. H265 is in general better than H264, but when you put the thumbscrews on it seems to get itself into a bit of trouble.

Wrt encoding/decoding complexity this is the major bottleneck, because you have the GPU competing with custom ASICs. I have a version of the codec that works in combination with H265, but still gets largish bandwidth gains, so if all you wanted was an insane hi-res and hi-bitrate transmissions that might be the way to go near-term.

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

#45
post #31

Very interesting! I’m getting more like 400-600 kbit/s, maybe too much beard and long hair. The face boxing seems very aggressive, I feel like I’m trapped in the virtual prison of some 90s dr who episode.

Try moving a bit further away from the camera, and placing the device on a steady surface. It might help.

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

#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 a mean squared error term in your objective function to help preserve general meaning.

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

#47

WOW. This is amazing. I really believe your project can be game changing for the video-call industry. Have you considered entering into the YC Program? I think it could be an awesome match. There are many startups I know they may want to take use of your service, and even fly.io is part of YC family! Also, have you thought about open-sourcing it? (perhaps using a dual license could work great for an enterprise offeri…

Thanks!

I tried entering YC in the fall 2021 batch, and got to the top 10%. I believe my main problem wrt YC is that I currently lack a co-founder, so I did not apply in the Spring as this was still the case.

I am seriously thinking about open source, I believe for instance WebRTC found a good model with dual-licensing, where you have something like AGPL with the option of buying exceptions.

I have had multiple advisors telling me not to though, they fear it would scare away any potential investors ;)

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

#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 deal so little with the nature of the images (AFAIK) and try to be generalists.

As this demonstrates, not all pixels are created equal.

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

#49

Didn't take a look yet but will, very cool. Where are the meetings rooms hosted?

The rooms are hosted on a Raspberry Pi 3 lying on the floor of my office. With the traffic it seems to be getting I will move it to a cloud server soonish.

It should do peer-to-peer for the majority of connections though, the server just does the initial hand-shake.

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

#50
Eventually, a neural-net approach to video codecs is inevitable, as including high-level semantics is much more dense. I wonder about a few things though:

• How much of the 8.7MB of the app are the weights?

• Did you measure the energy consumption difference between this and H265? Especially considering Apple has hardware acceleration for this.

• Do you plan for a Web port as well?

• Is the performance envelope tied to CoreML, or has the Android version already been confirmed to have the same performance even without a Tensor chip?

• Do you have plans to address the enterprise market? How many participants could you scale to?

(I don’t think any of this would be a fundamental issue, but it could help frame the target market. Maybe phone conversations are not as marketable because of the limited battery, but daily team meetings with ~10 people could have adoption if a few features were added.)

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