10 ms·
Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta
- SuperPaintMan 11y agoThere is mention of GCV being able to calculate various image properties (dominant colour, being the example) yet there is no reference to what it actually returns in the API docs. Can someone who has this active shed some light?
- stevesearer 11y agoI would definitely pay for a WordPress plugin that uses this as I manually tag photos on my site with a lot of standard things this could probably just knock out in a flash.
- arondeparon 11y agoHi, noticed your comment and just wanted to let you know that, during the alpha testing phase, I actually made this. It's somewhat rough and unreleased now, but I am wondering what you would expect from such a plugin. Could you answer some of these questions? - Would you primarily use the plugin to auto-tag uploads in the admin area? - Would you have problems with getting your own Google API key (and thus billing via Google), or would you expect the plugin to take care of this as well? - Any other expectations? As said, what I have now is not really release-worthy, but I can get it to that point in a matter of days. Thanks. - Aron
- jfoster 11y agoI feel like this is some really compelling tech. It would be so amazing to build stuff with this in mind. I wouldn't be comfortable doing it, though. This sort of API is available only until Google decide that they don't want it to be available. There's not really anything close to equivalent that you could drop in to replace it if it were being shut down, the price were being hiked, or you had some sort of other issue with it. I'm not trying to pick on Google for shutting things down; I would feel similarly if this API were from Microsoft or Facebook. It's not the first time there's been an API that I think is really cool, but was very apprehensive about actually using for anything serious.
- cfcef 11y agoYou're being paranoid for several reasons. First, you will presumably be keeping the classifications you get from the API (if for no other reason than $2/1000 can really add up and why would you do that to yourself?). Second, Google has historically always had very generous end-of-life announcements. Third, there are already a number of competitors, including the trained CNNs Google has already released. Fourth, even if there were no competitors nor pre-trained models, deep learning is increasingly accessible and you could learn to imitate a past ImageNet-winning CNN in Torch/Theano/Tensflow/etc and train it within a few weeks. Fifth, paid Google services tend to hang around longer. Sixth, machine learning is a major part of Google and they are increasingly rolling it out to their services and may well be using this API themselves, making closing it not such a great idea. So you're passing up what could be substantial benefits, Google isn't going to close it anytime soon, if they do you will have months of warning, and can easily replace it with a competitor or your own.
- jfoster 11y agoThat makes sense. Cheers!
- vgt 11y agoThere's a nice opinion on this from CloudTP: http://www.cloudtp.com/2016/01/21/dont-let-vendor-lock-in-fears-devalue-your-cloud-initiative/ http://www.cloudtp.com/2016/01/21/dont-let-vendor-lock-in-fe... TL;DR: You don't get the girl if you don't ask for a dance :)
- onli 11y agoThere actually are other APIs, though with a smaller scope. For text extraction for example there is the OnDemand Api, https://dev.havenondemand.com/apis/ocrdocument#overview https://dev.havenondemand.com/apis/ocrdocument#overview, backed by HP. They also have logo detection. I'd be surprised if no replacement for the category detection exists. Though I admit I also hesitate to replace that API with the google offering for the one app where I actually use it. The results would probably be better, but I just got burned again from stuff shutting down, and I remember Google Reader. But the Vision Api looks cool.
- netinstructions 11y agoI was looking into label detection APIs (and Google's offerings as well) for a silly game/website I was thinking of writing, but $5 per 1000 images is way too steep, especially if each user is submitting 1-5 images per interaction with the website. The $2 per 1000 images price they mention on the blog post is only if you're doing 5+ million images a month. I played with IBM Watson visual recognition API and it didn't look like it did what I needed it to (recognize a hand drawn image of a cat for example -- it just kept labeling it only as a 'cartoon'). Bummer. At least the first 1000 images are free so I can prototype it out of curiosity.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- eurekin 11y agoI wrote once document detection library. It was supposed to recognize corners of a printout in a photo. Is that close? EDIT: you could send me example images and what you need from them. I could check how much I would need to extend it to handle your case.
- BookmarkSaver 11y agoDetecting boundaries and straight lines is something that has been "easily" done for a while now. Categorizing complex images (such as differentiating between a cat and a dog) is still extremely difficult for computers. I'm not really surprised that Watson couldn't do it, I've only recently started hearing about preliminary breakthroughs in the feasibility of this sort of tech.
- tommoor 11y agoAgreed, this is an exciting api but the pricing puts it out of reach for a lot of applications
- spoiler 11y agoI'd like to preface this with the fact that I have next to zero experience about the topic of pricing/charging for such service's, so what I say might sound naïve, but… Is it really that expensive, though? I mean I can see it being expensive if you use it inside a product you offer for free, but if it's a commercial product, I imagine the pricing isn't that much especially if you consider that using your own infrastructure for this type of machine learning and image scanning would be much much more expensive.
- jrnkntl 11y agoJust tried a couple of images with digits to test out the OCR w/ the TEXT_DETECTION setting, unfortunately it assumes what it reads is a defined language with words. I am looking into using this for digit-recognition and only digits, but that doesn't seem to be a use case (as it is now). Does anybody know of another service/API that can do reliable digits-only OCR on (not the finest clear quality) images?
- mikevin 11y agoWeird, their example at https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/cloud-vision/tree/master/python/text https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/cloud-vision/tree/mas... shows digits. Your best bet is probably ABBYY if you want something else.
- chippy 11y agoI hope to play with this also tomorrow, as I want to see if it can extract numbers from pictures of a street. The docs say "TEXT_DETECTION 1024 x 768 OCR requires more resolution to detect characters" How big were the images you used?
- tegansnyder 11y agoI've been using this since the private beta to enrich my eCommerce crawlers with product identifiers not found on the content of an eCommerce product page, but found in the product image itself. Imagine a part number or UPC displayed on a product box, but nowhere in the HTML content of the product page. Using the Google CV OCR feature I can extract meaningful product data from an image to compliment my existing crawl data. It works great.
- duaneb 11y agoWhat's the hit rate for extracting meaningful information? Any false positives?
- tegansnyder 11y agoSince I compare the extracted OCR data against known part, catalog, upcs, skus, the variability is boolean. For instance if I OCR a picture of a tape roll and it has a part number printed on the seam I compare that to a trusted data source of part numbers.
- Laaw 11y agoOut of curiosity, why are there so many people crawling sites for prices like what you're talking about? All of the freelance sites are... well, crawling with jobs involving web scrapers. What's the business here that I'm missing?
- matt_wulfeck 11y agoIf you can manage to slide -- even just a tiny bit -- between consumers and Ecom sites you can make a lot of money from referrals! This is what slickeals and camelcamelcamel do, though only one of those uses scrapers.
- bduerst 11y agoEconomically speaking, it's taking advantage of imperfect markets, where even in this age of internet search information still doesn't flow perfectly from seller to buyer. Throw in affiliate and referral incentives, and you've created an information market.
- kevando 11y agoGoogle is scary good at releasing scary technology in a friendly box.
- alwaysdoit 11y agohttp://xkcd.com/1425/ http://xkcd.com/1425/ Errata: I'll need a research team and a year and a half.
- jfoster 11y agoI don't know for certain, but I suspect that Google utilized images from the web in training this system. Even if they didn't, suppose they had. I think this can raise an interesting question around copyright. In training an AI system with hundreds/thousands of bits of data, no single piece of training data makes much of a difference. If one of my images on the web that I had captioned with the keyword 'dog' was used to train this system about what a dog looks like, is the model they end up with a derivative work of my captioned image? Yes, but my data would make up an infinitesimally small part of that model. Yet, in aggregate, the trained model might almost wholly rely on lots of copyrighted, rights-reserved images. Would the resulting model be a copyright infringement? It would seem as though no rights owner would have a substantial enough claim. Yet, without all of the copyrighted works, perhaps the model would be ineffective.
- lallysingh 11y agoI donno. If I'm composing music, and I heard your music before that, is my music implicitly derived? Your music certainly had some infinitesimal affect on me.
- jfoster 11y agoAbsolutely, but any music you compose probably also has an element of originality in it, or at least draws inspiration from something that is non-musical in nature. For a trained AI, the entire model is just a derivative work of all the training data. It's not as though the AI had a lover who left them and drew inspiration from that experience to become a more effective AI.
- lallysingh 11y agoSo to avoid the copyright situation, I just mix in some random nonce data, infinitesimally small, to make it equivalent?
- jfoster 11y agoMaybe that fixes it. Maybe you don't even have to if the copyright question only ever remains theoretical. I have a feeling it might only be a matter of time until this question arises in a case, though.
- mayank 11y agoInteresting that this is released in source closed, API-only form, rather than the open-code model taken by TensorFlow. I wonder how far you could approximate the model by training a learner on the API responses.
- abtinf 11y agoDisclosure: I am an evangelist for the Watson Developer Cloud suite of services at IBM. The new wave of vision services are amazing. There are a lot of players in this field, including IBM Watson, which has a suite of vision APIs available with similar features. One key differentiator of the Watson offering is that we have a trainable API called Visual Recognition [2]. The pre-trained APIs are excellent and have broad uses, but it's amazing to see the results from even basic training to identify image tags directly relevant to your use case. There is a demo [3] that allows you to try it out by creating a new classifier right in the web page. You can find some demos at: http://vision.alchemy.ai/#demo http://vision.alchemy.ai/#demo - example images that demonstrate facial detection and identification, label extraction, object identification, and so on. Another demo at http://visual-insights-demo.mybluemix.net/ http://visual-insights-demo.mybluemix.net/ uses the Visual Insights [1] API to identify a set of relevant tags. [1]: https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/visual-insights.html https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developerc... [2]: https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/visual-recognition.html https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developerc... [3]: https://visual-recognition-demo.mybluemix.net/ https://visual-recognition-demo.mybluemix.net/
- teh 11y agoDo you have pricing information available anywhere? All I can see is [1] but that's not really interesting. Compare with [2] which makes it quite easy to guess how much I'd pay. [1] http://www.alchemyapi.com/products/contact-sales http://www.alchemyapi.com/products/contact-sales [2] https://cloud.google.com/vision/pricing https://cloud.google.com/vision/pricing
- yrezgui 11y agoHi Teh, I'm a IBM Watson Developer Evangelist. The pricing is available here when you click on Standard plan: https://console.ng.bluemix.net/catalog/alchemy_api/ https://console.ng.bluemix.net/catalog/alchemy_api/
- philip142au 11y ago
- ig1 11y agoIf the OCR is good then they're totally burying the lede, it's pricing is 100x cheaper than commercial OCR APIs. It's potentially a game changer, plenty of industries have piles of scanned documents. Cheap OCR means this data suddenly becomes accessible even if the value per individual document is low (i.e. for input into machine learning).
- mgpc 11y agoPaper from a few years ago comparing Google's OCR system to commercially available benchmarks: http://www.educatingsilicon.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/photoocr_iccv_paper.pdf http://www.educatingsilicon.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/p... A lot better for text in photographs. Comparison might be different on dense document text though.
- chippy 11y agoI couldn't find a specific legal SLA for this new service. Does anyone know if: 1) by using the service you grant Google use of the uploaded images. (e.g. they can use your image to increase their corpus, improve the service or use it for advertising, or use it to extract street numbers for their maps, or its always private and never stored) 2) What the resulting copyright is of the returned data. If you were to build a database based on the results, what license or copyright status this would be. Would all rights belong to me, or would Google claim rights over the results.
- SEMW 11y agoIf there's no service specific T&Cs for this, it falls under their general cloud T&Cs: https://cloud.google.com/terms/ https://cloud.google.com/terms/. s.5: > 5.1 Intellectual Property Rights. Except as expressly set forth in this Agreement, this Agreement does not grant either party any rights, implied or otherwise, to the other’s content or any of the other’s intellectual property. As between the parties, Customer owns all Intellectual Property Rights in Customer Data and the Application or Project (if applicable), and Google owns all Intellectual Property Rights in the Services and Software. > 5.2 Use of Customer Data. Google will not access or use Customer Data, except as necessary to provide the Services to Customer.
- jfoster 11y agoRe (2): The answer to that sort of question doesn't even seem clear for other, more widely used Google products. I'm thinking Google Translate or the fonts in their office suite. Both things that most people probably don't think too much about the copyright implications of, but possibly should.
- kauegimenes 11y agoAnyone tried using the API to solve captchas?
- tommoor 11y ago"Google Cloud Captcha API"
- misiti3780 11y agoAm I the only one that signed up but cant have access to it ?
- swampthinker 11y ago"joyLikelihood:VERY_LIKELY" While this technology is fascinating, I can't help but feel a little unsettled reading that.
- afro88 11y agoDoes something like this exist for sound? Any open source projects worth looking at?
- knicholes 11y agoIf there is, I'm totally starting my audiolytics business!
- killahpriest 11y agohttp://clarify.io/ http://clarify.io/
- dzhiurgis 11y agoIs there any website where can I just upload a pic and see how it works without trying to figure out how to access their API?
- ahamino 11y agoTry that app .. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.affectiva.affdexme&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.affectiva.... https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/affdexme/id971529011?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/affdexme/id971529011?mt=8
- Jabbles 11y agoIs the best way of sending an image still base64 encoding it in JSON?
- dsp1234 11y agoIf 'best' means most compatible with varying types of systems large and small, then yes.
- ramramanathan1 11y agoyou can also provide the image by passing in Google Cloud Storage location
- ahamino 11y agoAffectiva offers SDKs for facial expression and emotion analysis from images that work in realtime and offline without having to send images to the cloud. http://developer.affectiva.com http://developer.affectiva.com disclamer: I work for them.
- anacleto 11y agoFinally. Finally. Finally. Here's a great deep dive into Google Vision API: http://cloudacademy.com/blog/google-vision-api-image-analysis/ http://cloudacademy.com/blog/google-vision-api-image-analysi... FaaS: future as service.
- misiti3780 11y agoWhen I hit "go to api console" i get the following: https://www.dropbox.com/s/xsysabgywa4t5mm/Screenshot%202016-02-18%2017.09.14.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/xsysabgywa4t5mm/Screenshot%202016-...
- piyushmakhija 11y agoCan we find the dimensions of things in a photo using this api?
- miltonmoura 11y agoThis is great news. I have been working on a Swift framework for using this API in OSX and iOS (https://github.com/mgcm/CloudVisionKit https://github.com/mgcm/CloudVisionKit) and I was wondering when it (the API) would become available for public use.
- ramramanathan1 11y agoWith the Beta release, it is available for public use.
- nchiring 11y agoHigh price. May be suitable for MVP.
- dk8996 11y agoAt Cortex (http://www.meetcortex.com/ http://www.meetcortex.com/) we are using this and technology like it to help brands be smarter about marketing content on social media. Really cool stuff.
- chenster 11y agoWould it be possible to do product recognition such as brand and model from images without label?
- pshirishreddy 11y agoHaving unlimited free storage for google photos makes sense now :)