In this Building with Watson presentation, learn how to train a classifier to identify images relevant to you and your company. View the on-demand version of the demonstration and listen to the Q&A with our Watson Vision engineers. http://www.ibm.com/watson/building-with-watson-webinar.html

1. Customizable APIs – Episode 1:
Custom Image Classifier with Visual
Recognition

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Housekeeping Items
• Webinar slides and on-demand recording will be
emailed post-webinar
• Ask questions at any time during the
presentation
- Use chat window on the webinar panel
- We're on Twitter: @IBMWatson #BuildingWithWatson
© 2015 International Business Machines Corporation

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Our Experts:
© 2015 International Business Machines Corporation
Matt Hill, Senior Software Engineer
IBM Research
Devin Harper, Development Lead
IBM Watson Vision Services

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Our Goals
• In this series, we want to focus
on the Watson services that
allow you to customize
functionality to better fit your use
case and industry
• Today, we'll be showing you our
Visual Recognition service,
which includes an option for
custom image classifiers
© 2015 International Business Machines Corporation

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Haven't we seen this before?
• We've covered image recognition services before,
but never like this!
• Our May 18th webinar
showed you how to add basic
image tagging to a BI dashboard using the built-in
classifiers offered by Visual Recognition
• Today we'll be diving in deeper to show you
exactly what is needed to train a custom image
classifier
© 2015 International Business Machines Corporation

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Think of yourself as Watson Vision’s Coach
• Provide example training images that are similar to the
images you plan to analyze
• If training the classifier "tiger", might be less accurate if
you provide only images of tigers in a zoo taken by a
mobile phone if you want to test the classifier on
images of tigers in the wild taken by professional
photographers.

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More guidelines for good training
• If the quality and content of training data is the same,
then classifiers that are trained on more images will
generally be more accurate
• The benefits of more images plateaus ~5000 images
• Recommend 150-200 images per .zip file for good
balance between training time and improvement to
accuracy

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Guidelines for high volume custom
classifying• Include approximately the same number of images in
each examples file
• Resize images to be no larger than 320 pixels in either
width or height. Images do not need to be high
resolution.
• Submit images in batches as compressed (.zip) files.
• Parallelize by groups of images, not groups of
classifiers
• Specify only the classifiers you want results for in the
classifier_ids parameter.

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Are you ready to get started?
• Visual Recognition documentation and demo
• Sign up for Bluemix
Join our Slack channel for more discussion
immediately following the webinar
© 2015 International Business Machines Corporation

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Have you built something with Watson
Conversation? Share your project with
us by August 15th for Watson swag and
a chance to be featured on our blog.
Contact us at
wdc-dev@bg.vnet.ibm.com or on the
Slack channel.
© 2015 International Business Machines Corporation

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Watson Developer Conference
What: IBM Watson’s first-ever developer conference to engage with our
growing developer community, reveal upcoming technology launches and foster
an environment for idea sharing, innovation and development.
When: November 9, 2016
Where: Innovation Hangar, San Francisco, CA
Who: Developers (come one, come all)
Why:
⎻ Connect with like-minded people
⎻ Get expert feedback
⎻ Hear from thought leaders and experts in this space
⎻ Influence the future of cognitive computing
Register now
http://www.ibm.com/watson/developer-conference/index.html

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© 2015 International Business Machines Corporation
Q&A

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What’s next?
• Look out for a follow up email with a copy of these slides, a recording of
the webinar, Q&A recap, and additional resources
• The series continues bi-weekly on Wednesdays @ 12pm ET / 9am PT
• Enhanced NLP APIs with Watson Knowledge Studio - Wednesday, August 10
• Training Watson Conversation to Detect User Intent - Wednesday, August 24
• New Tools for Easy Dialog Scripting - Wednesday, September 7
• Application Starter Kits for Developers - Wednesday, September 21

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Thank you for attending!
Contact us
Phone: 1-877-253-0308
Email: wdc-dev@bg.vnet.ibm.com
Online: Watson Developer Cloud