An introductory exploration of computer vision powered by machine learning and other AI technologies.

1. COMPUTERS ARE OPENING THEIR EYES
— AND THEY’RE ALREADY BETTER AT
SEEING THAN WE ARE

2. ● It’s ready for prime time
● It’s coming faster than you think
● It’s a gateway capability
● It’s changing everything
● It creates a richer experience
● It’s easier to use than you think
● Q&A
COMPUTER VISION
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3. ABOUT ME

4. STARTUPS & ENTERPRISE
chris.mohritz@10xeffect.com
● Lead a startup accelerator for web/mobile
● Also run corporate innovation events & consulting
● Using A.I. (machine learning) in business since 2009
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5. Philosopher
MY PERSPECTIVE
Sherpa
vs.
Learn & lead by doing. Learn & lead from theory.
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6. IT’S READY FOR PRIME TIME

7. And what better way to demonstrate that it’s ready for
prime time, than to show it live...
PS — this is an open source application written by IBM

8. visual-recognition-demo.mybluemix.net
Photo: youtube.com/watch?v=tE2ihx0nJMI
Three human faces
identified
Attempt to guess ages
and gender of identified
faces
List of objects and colors in
the image and the scene
context
Hierarchical breakdown of
the scene context

9. CREATE A CUSTOM MODEL
visual-recognition-demo.mybluemix.net/train

10. Classifier Application
HOW IT WORKS
Face, object &
scene recognition
Cloud Visual API
Production
Images

11. PRICING
●FEATURE 1 - 1000 UNITS/MO
1001- 1,000,000
UNITS/MO
1,000,001 to 5,000,000
UNITS/MO
5,000,001 - 20,000,000
UNITS/MO
Label Detection Free $1.50 / 1000 units $1.50 / 1000 units $1.00 / 1000 units
OCR Free $1.50 / 1000 units $1.50 / 1000 units $0.60 / 1000 units
Explicit Content Detection Free Free with Label Detection*
Facial Detection Free $1.50 / 1000 units $1.50 / 1000 units $0.60 / 1000 units
Landmark Detection Free $1.50 / 1000 units $1.50 / 1000 units $0.60 / 1000 units
Logo Detection Free $1.50 / 1000 units $1.50 / 1000 units $0.60 / 1000 units
Image Properties Free $1.50 / 1000 units $1.50 / 1000 units $0.60 / 1000 units

12. IMAGE SIZING
VISION API FEATURE RECOMMENDED SIZE NOTES
FACE_DETECTION 1600 x 1200 Distance between eyes is most important
LANDMARK_DETECTION 640 x 480
LOGO_DETECTION 640 x 480
LABEL_DETECTION 640 x 480
TEXT_DETECTION 1024 x 768
OCR requires more resolution to detect
characters
SAFE_SEARCH_DETECTION 640 x 480
cloud.google.com/vision/docs/supported-files

13. WHERE IS THE A.I.?
In the system’s ability to determine objects and
context within each image.
Compared to having people view and judge images
manually.
Remember: A.I. is subjective

14. WHAT IS COMPUTER VISION?
And just to clarify…
Visual recognition — exploring face detection,
emotion recognition, text extraction, damage
identification, context awareness, and more.

15. EXAMPLES IN USE TODAY
Manufacturing
● Ensure products are positioned correctly on an
assembly line
Visual auditing
● Monitor for compliance or deterioration in fleet of
trucks, planes, or windmills
● Train classifiers to understand what defects look
like
Insurance
● Quickly process claims by classifying images of
claims
Social listening
● Track buzz about your company on social media
Security
● Monitor for activity, instantly classify objects as
threat or not
Social commerce
● Use an image of a food dish to find out which
restaurant serves it and find reviews
● Use a travel photo to find vacation suggestions
based on similar experiences
● Use a house image to find similar homes that are
for sale
Retail
● Take a photo of a favorite outfit to find stores with
those clothes in stock or on sale
● Use a travel image to find retail suggestions in that
area
Education
● Create image-based applications to educate about
taxonomies
● Use pictures to find educational material on similar
subjects
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16. Computers have already matched — and exceeded —
human capabilities when it comes to understanding
visual information.
Now it’s just a question of finding uses and applying
this new capability in productive ways.
READY FOR PRIME TIME
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17. IT’S COMING FASTER THAN YOU
THINK

18. ALREADY BETTER THAN HUMANS
February, 2015 — “...researchers say their system
achieved a 4.94% error rate... In previous experiments,
humans have achieved an estimated 5.1% error rate.”
microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/microsoft-researchers-algorithm-sets-imagenet-challenge-m
ilestone

19. AND COMING SOON...CREATE
Write a text description of an
existing image.
Given a text description,
generate an image from scratch.
petapixel.com/2016/09/23/googles-image-captioning-ai
-can-describe-photos-94-accuracy youtu.be/rAbhypxs1qQ?t=5s
[ 2016 ]

20. PLUS...
[ 2017 ]
Fotogenerator.npocloud.nl
...and A.I. finishes
it for you.
Sketch a wireframe

21. Computer vision is already better than humans at
identifying objects within images.
And they just started learning how to create images
from scratch...and they’re already pretty good at it.
FASTER THAN YOU THINK
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22. IT’S A GATEWAY CAPABILITY

23. If you’re looking for a place to begin your A.I. journey,
this is a good starting point...

24. THE PROBLEM
We live in a visual world, yet capturing useful
information from images has historically required
human vision — which can be slow and costly.

25. THE GOAL
But if we could extract that useful information
through computer vision, it could provide
invaluable insight for business.

26. THE SOLUTION
An intelligent visual recognition service that
automatically analyzes and identifies objects and
scenes in image files (video, etc.).

27. A HIGH PROFILE EXAMPLE
Facial recognition
systems are coming on
strong and being used
in a wide variety of
applications.
youtu.be/K4u4Dpl6NKk?t=1m9s

28. Visual recognition is 1 of 2 critical capabilities that will
allow artificial intelligence to integrate into and
empower our world in ways we’ve only dreamed of.
It allows computers to interact with humans on our
own terms — to integrate into our daily lives.
GATEWAY CAPABILITY
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Speech is the other one.

29. IT’S CHANGING EVERYTHING

30. We’re unlocking the entire visual world for computers.
What can they do with it?

31. VEHICLE NAVIGATION
nvidia.com/object/drive-px.html

32. ROBOTS
engadget.com/2014/09/08/google-details-object-recognition-tech

33. FARMING
Automatically sorting
crops.
cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2016/08/how-a-japanese-cucumber-farmer-is-using-deep-le
arning-and-tensorflow

34. VISUAL PRODUCT SEARCH
slyce.it/product

35. INFRINGEMENT MONITORING
Keep an eye out for
intellectual property
infringement.
Photo credit: flickr.com/photos/inthe-arena/12939586573

36. MONITORING BRAND EXPOSURE
Track how
often your
advertising is
shown.
Photo:sportvision.com/baseball/virtual-advertisements

37. IT’S EVEN CHANGING ‘PEOPLE
WATCHING’
medium.com/homeland-security/no-longer-just-another-face-in-the-crowd-15e1c74fe24

38. Giving computers access to the visual world will
empower our work and lives.
Amplifying human productivity in endless ways.
IT’S CHANGING EVERYTHING
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39. IT CREATES A RICHER
EXPERIENCE

40. “Customer
experience is the
new battlefield.”
~ Gartner, 2015
accenture.com/us-en/insight-artificial-intelligence-ui
EXPERIENCE ABOVE ALL

41. VIP TREATMENT
A top customer walks into your store.
The system instantly recognizes them, issues a
personalized greeting, and alerts an attendant.
And/or…
Allows you to track store visits just as we track web
visits in Google Analytics (faces vs. IP addresses).

42. VIP TREATMENT
consumerreports.org/privacy/facial-recognition-who-is-tracking-you-in-public1

43. EMOTION RECOGNITION
popularmechanics.com/technology/a18636/facewatch-facial-recognition-identify-criminals
Analyze how
people react to
your product.
Or dynamically
adjust a system
based on
people’s
emotion.

44. It’s often said that the verbal and audible elements of
communication only make up 45% of what is being
said.
Computers can now see, read — and act upon — the
other 55%.
A RICHER EXPERIENCE
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45. IT’S EASIER THAN YOU THINK

46. START WITH COMMERCIAL APIs
Commercial Platform, Their Training Data
Commercial Platform, Your Training Data
In-House Platform, Your Training Data
A.I. M
aturity
← No training data required!

47. NOTHING NEW HERE
Most of the major cloud providers
have purpose-built A.I.-powered APIs.
Many have a free tier.
And they work exactly like
every other API you’re already using.

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ESLOTS OF COMMERCIAL OPTIONS
Jumping back to our demo above, here are some
alternative commercial APIs…
● IBM Watson Visual Recognition
● Microsoft Computer Vision API
● Clarifai

49. Start with a pre-trained cloud API (no training data
required).
Most cloud providers offer a free tier. So start thinking
about the different ways to use computer vision.
Then just start testing and see what you can do.
EASIER THAN YOU THINK
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Don't get me wrong, there's an insane amount of complexity behind the scenes.
But fortunately, you need to know that stuff to take advantage of A.I.

50. NEXT STEPS

51. HOW-TO GUIDES
● Building Voice-Enabled Products With Amazon Alexa
● Cognitive Customer Engagement Using IBM Watson
● Harnessing Visual Data Using Google Cloud
● Building a Recommendation Engine Using Microsoft Azure
● Predicting Marketing Campaign Response Using Amazon Machine Learning
● Unleashing A.I.-Powered Conversation With IBM Watson
● Get into the Mind of Your Customer Using Google’s Sentiment Analysis Tools
● Discover Your Customers’ Deepest Feelings Using Microsoft Facial Recognition
● Give Your Products the Power of Speech Using Amazon Polly
● Computers Are Opening Their Eyes — and They’re Already Better at Seeing Than We Are
● How to Predict When You’re Going to Lose a Subscriber
● The Future of Business is a Digital Spokesperson — Let’s Build a Preview Using Microsoft’s Bot
Framework
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52. COMING UP...
2 A.I. Technologies that will have the greatest impact
● Computer Speech — 12:00-12:45 pm
● Computer Vision — 1:00-1:45 pm
2 A.I. Applications with the quickest R.O.I.
● Customer Engagement — 2:00-2:45 pm
● Personalization — 3:00-3:45 pm
JO
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53. ● Computer speech is ready for prime time
● It’s coming faster than you think
● It’s a gateway capability
● It’s changing everything
● It creates a richer experience
● It’s easier to use than you think
JOURNEY’S END
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54. QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS?
chris.mohritz@10xeffect.com
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55. THANK YOU