Hacker News Reader

Comment by abtinf | Hacker News Reader

It's exciting to see more of these services come to market.

IBM Watson has a suite of vision APIs available that have some similar features.

For example, the demo at http://vision.alchemy.ai/#demo has example images that demonstrate facial detection and identification, label extraction, object identification, and so on.

Another demo at http://visual-insights-demo.mybluemix.net/ uses the Visual Insights [1] API to identify a set of relevant tags.

And the recently released Visual Recognition [2] API allows you to train the model with your own dataset. Demo: http://visual-recognition-demo.mybluemix.net/

Disclosure: I am an evangelist for the Watson Developer Cloud suite of services at IBM.

[1]: https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developerc...

[2]: https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developerc...

View on HN

Wow, that looks fantastic! I was looking like something like this for ages.

Some feedback though:

- As an independent developer, pricing is important to me. It was very difficult to find pricing for the Watson APIs (apparently it was in Bluemix?) and if I wasn't a little more determined (thanks to the ability to train my own classifier), I wouldn't have persevered.

- If I already have a wealth of labelled data (I do), it seems difficult to train a new classifier for the Visual Recognition service. If I have 200 000 images each with an average of 20 labels (from a set of ~2000 labels) for example, the positive + negative sample per label is very time and bandwidth consuming, as I have to train 2000 classifiers using ~ 5000 images per classifier (for plenty of training data), for a total of ~10 000 000 uploads. It'd be far nicer to be able to upload a folder of JPEGs with a JSON blob per file containing labels (or a classifier name) and have Watson derive positive and negative samples from it.

One of the various open source alternatives, http://www.deepdetect.com/applications/model/

Thank you for the solid feedback!

As a work-around for mass uploading, I might suggest signing up for a 30 day free Bluemix trial [1]. You could then upload your data to a container and script the creation of sample archives and uploads from there.

[1]: https://console.ng.bluemix.net/registration/

Thank you for posting this. I had seen Watson's stuff before whenever it was originally released, but have recently stumbled upon it again and am just gobsmacked at the APIs available, such as speech/text translation. I don't want to insinuate that you could be doing a better job at evangelizing ;)...but the more you just remind people of Watson, the more happiness you'll bring to a good number of developers purely through introducing them to what they might have ignored because they didn't think to look at IBM. I mean I see far more buzz around WolframAlpha stuff and yet not much of what they've offered seems as accessible or purely useful as what Watson purports to have.

(I would also say the exact same thing for Microsoft and it's Project Oxford APIs, whoever here is working as its evangelist)

I would be interested in seeing a comparison - how the different vision APIs react to the same 10-15 images.

It would be very interesting if the two looped together, each using the other as a reference to improve their own parameters ;).

Reminds me of http://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/

There is an ad-hoc comparison of a few of top existing services here:

http://imagga.com/blog/imagga-and-6-alternative-image-recogn...

and here: http://imagga.com/blog/some-more-image-recognition-tests-som...

Disclaimer: I'm CEO & CTO of Imagga.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com