How to keep the children’s room tidy
The general concept of artificial intelligence has been around for a long time, but it is only recently, when all the necessary elements became generally available, that AI has become a practical and usable thing. In the next few years, just about everything you do is going to be tracked, analyzed, and filtered through some sort of artificial intelligence. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and a slew of other technology companies have been building algorithms and developing machine learning protocols in anticipation of this point in time for years, and all of that work is about to pay off. With Cognitive Services, Microsoft wants to make the transition to an AI-driven world as simple as it can for developers and enterprise decision makers alike.
So at the end of 2016 year Microsoft announced the availability of a set of 21 new APIs to provides simple APIs that handle common use cases, such as recognizing speech or performing facial recognition on an image. These APIs can be broken down into five main categories: vision, speech, language, knowledge, and search. They are all based on machine learning algorithms.
The Computer Vision has many features that include the ability to analyze a picture to understand its content, create smart thumbnails (to ensure you never crop the region of interest), as well as OCR and adult content detection.
Adult content detection is one feature of the Vision APIs, for example by one API call we can have a probability score for inappropriate content within the picture and decide the action to take, for example we can decide to not stored in the cloud the image with adult content. The list of features you wish to enable in the analysis process, the options available to you are:
- Image-type
- Color
- Faces
- Adult
- Categories
- Tags
- Description
I tested the Computer Vision in a scenario regarding my children: to check if their room is in order -)
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a little tool that shows if the children’s rooms are neat and clear ?
Thanks to latest image processing technology, I used to Computer Vision to measure the tidiness in the room and displays the result on scale from 0 (perfectly tidy) to 10 (chaos).
My webcam placed in the room acquires the images from the kids room, for example in this photo there was a perfectly tidy room:
instead in this picture there is a bit of disorder:
I used a Node-RED flow to acquire image from camera, invoke the Computer Vision rest API and to assign a score to the tidiness in the room and displays the result on scale from 0 (perfectly tidy) to 10 (chaos). My algorithm assign a score based on the different items contained in description.
Here are some examples:
Fortunately this is not my kids room, the description of this image says it all, really:
Microsoft Cognitive Services allows developers to build incredibly complex features into apps using only a couple of lines of code.
Of course this is only experiment is just a game, I will not let an algorithm control my children…not yet 🙂
