Hacker News Reader

Comment by NEDM64 | Hacker News Reader

I think Microsoft's works better, try also IBM's if you can.

So I tried Microsoft's CV & IBM's AlchemyVision on the same image (since they both have an online demo sandbox). The Microsoft just gave me back more labels and stronger sentiment figures for same labels. Hence narrowed it down to these 2.

If you tried the Watson vision offering when it was "AlchemyVision" then you may have tried a now out-of-date version of the service. The AlchemyVision and Visual Recognition tiles on Bluemix have recently been combined in a way that utilizes their complementary strengths. Consider retrying the updated service if you'd like!

Disclosure: I work at IBM Watson.

ok - my bad. I just saw the AlchemyVision has been merged into Visual Recognition starting May 20th. We will definitely check it out to see what extra features have been added.

qq - Is the API stabalized, by which I mean will there be further changes/merges?

The API has stabilized. There will be future changes, and I would expect to see those as the service gets new features added (like retraining).

May 20 the AlchemyVision and Watson Visual Recognition Beta services merged into Watson Visual Recognition - http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl...

We're continually improving them (as everyone in computer vision is!) but for now one key feature of Watson Vision is the ability to train a custom classifier for your own data by just giving a bunch of example images. The service also provides general image tagging, text extraction(beta), face detection and a fixed list people for celebrity facial recognition.

We see this as a green-field area where rapid progress is being made across the board... I wouldn't count anyone out yet!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com