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Facebook’s AI unlocks the ability to search photos by what’s in them

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Re: Facebook’s AI unlocks the ability to search photos by what’s in them

#61

Post by newscracker »

In the recent times, for some other unrelated reasons, my browsing of FB pages and people's profiles was a bit slow from the network and download side (I always use a browser to visit Facebook, not the app). I noticed how accurate Facebook was in classifying photos when I saw the alt text captions for photos (before the image loaded). It was impressive, being able to say approximately how many people were there, whether a person was smiling, whether a photo was a selfie, whether a person was standing, whether a picture contained a landscape, trees and many other things.

It was also creepy that Facebook knew so much, because though I use Facebook for specific purposes and try to limit what I put there, I didn't imagine that images could convey so much information/metadata that would be useful to the underlying platform.

Re: Facebook’s AI unlocks the ability to search photos by what’s in them

#62

Post by mahyarm »

lefnire wrote: post #48
philsnow wrote: post #8

Google photos does this. I just opened Google photos and searched for "food" and aside from a couple pictures of some jack o lanterns (which are arguable, but I don't know anybody who eats theirs on Nov 1st), the results were spot on. "Unlocks" might not be the right word here.

Google never gets any credit. I used Google Now before Siri exploded the world. I listened to a machine learning series, which started like: "... applications include Facebook's facial recognition, Amazon's product recommendations, Google's image search, and Apple's self-driving car." Apple's car? Google is the world king of ML, and you gave them image search ?

I personally call Google 'God of the Internet', although AWS would be a pretty good competitor for that title.

Re: Facebook’s AI unlocks the ability to search photos by what’s in them

#63

Post by iklos55 »

castratikron wrote: post #54
iklos55 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really off-topic, but: Are there (tech) news-sites which do not have this 10-100MB bloat with three js framweorks and gifs, ads and whatnot? I'd gladly pay for a minimalist news source...

You could do what I do and open them in Links/Lynx, a command-line browser. You only need the text, anyways, right?

i'll compare that with ublock/umatrix. thanks!

Re: Facebook’s AI unlocks the ability to search photos by what’s in them

#64

Post by maverick_iceman »

Analog24 wrote: post #28
david-given wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I search Google Photos for 'dog', the top seven hits are, in order: a fuzzy toy, a possum, another picture of the same possum, a cat, a pair of goats, a sheep, and I think it's a pheasant. The dog is #8. Of course, if I search Google Photos for 'me', the top hit is a frog, so maybe it just hates me. Update : not any more! Now the frog is #2. The top hit if I search for 'me' is the MV Isle of Lewis car ferry, photo…

I never used this feature until despite using Google photos extensively (I have ~60 GB of photos on there, granted that's 60 GB on my computer which isn't with the same compression/quality that Google uses). I have to say that I'm extremely impressed. it took multiple attempts to even find a mistake ("mountains", "city", "cat", "guitar", "food"). Although I was a little disappointed to find no results when I searched…

You can add your name to a photo of yours (or any name to any photo). Google will then automatically find all of your photos. When you touch search look at the face of people that shows up below.

Re: Facebook’s AI unlocks the ability to search photos by what’s in them

#65

Post by philsnow »

philsnow wrote: post #8

Google photos does this. I just opened Google photos and searched for "food" and aside from a couple pictures of some jack o lanterns (which are arguable, but I don't know anybody who eats theirs on Nov 1st), the results were spot on. "Unlocks" might not be the right word here.

As an addendum, I have two kids, and the google photos recognition rate for them is astonishing. They're ~2 years apart and google photos never confuses pictures of the older one with pictures of the younger one taken ~2 years later, for instance.

Re: Facebook’s AI unlocks the ability to search photos by what’s in them

#67

Post by angry-hacker »

philsnow wrote: post #8

Google photos does this. I just opened Google photos and searched for "food" and aside from a couple pictures of some jack o lanterns (which are arguable, but I don't know anybody who eats theirs on Nov 1st), the results were spot on. "Unlocks" might not be the right word here.

And in EU, the most useful feature face recognition, doesn't work because Google is afraid if privacy laws. After all the data I have given them suddenly the data I do want to give is kit possible.

Re: Facebook’s AI unlocks the ability to search photos by what’s in them

#68

Post by zapt02 »

mdrzn wrote: post #34
zapt02 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that was for accessibility reasons, ie screen readers.

but it also allows you to do the opposite things, like search for "sky" and find that image.

didn't know that, cool!
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