Show HN: Logo Crunch – Multi-resolution logo maker | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Logo Crunch – Multi-resolution logo maker

brandmark.io

328 pointsJack00065 comments

Not only is this not computer vision, but the image processing employed is quite naive and the results are poor. One need only move the Simplify slider all the way to the right on the default N/S America globe icon and then start inching it back to the left to see a solid example of this. I'm aware that I'm being very dismissive here, but the "it uses computer vision" marketing bs really grinds my gears.

It looks like it's just doing server-side http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/morphology/#basic

Hello massive diamond kernels.

We took 'computer vision' out of the title above.

I am curious to know, does the HN software have an automatic trigger for comments that mention "title" or is it more a case of mods looking at the front page every now and then and if a comment about the title is sufficiently highly voted in a frontpaged post you look into it and make a decision?

The latter. I used to have an automatic trigger but it broke when I ported my client software from one obscure Lisp to another, and I haven't yet gotten it working again.

Basically we do cmd+f title a lot.

typically you would leave the large sizes as-is, the filters are mostly useful for the smaller sizes where you don't see the diamond kernel effect.

not sure why people so upset about the name, mathematical morphology is commonly used in computer vision. As far as marketing BS goes it's pretty tame compared to some of the stuff I've seen on hn.

> morphology is commonly used in computer vision

Loops are commonly used in computer vision. And yet here we are not calling loops computer vision.

> not sure why people so upset about the name

Learned people get upset when they see grandiose or otherwise erroneous claims about trivial things, regardless of the field, because it signals either bumbling naiveté or intent to deceive, and both are perceived as dangers to the community.

I feel like we're just arguing over semantics. I agree that "computer vision" is a slight stretch, but it's hardly malicious.

> bumbling naiveté or intent to deceive

maybe the real danger to the community is unfounded hostility :/

On iPhone, when I choose random Logo I always get image of North and South America on a globe.

The effects on scale are pretty good. Would be cool to see comparison vs more traditional image scaling methods. Thanks for sharing this

Is Central America missing for you?

But I get the same logo as well when tapping random on Pixel.

Central America is there. It does kind of drop out of the reduced images when you get down towards 48x48 but that makes sense because it's the smallest feature.

As for the random button the author replied and they've locked it to a single image for now to help with the load on the servers. Single image is easier to cache the responses for.

Happens to me as well when I choose random: https://xkcd.com/221/

It's fine though because it is a good demonstration graphic.

I've limited it to that one for now so the server doesn't fall over, there are a few others that I'll add as I warm the cache

Can't get it to work on Firefox due to it trying to load jQuery from code.jquery.com where the CORS-policy disallows it. Specifically:

> Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.12.4.min.js. (Reason: CORS header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' missing).

oops, fixed!

Looks to be fixed now, jquery loaded from same domain for me.

Is the code available for this? Would be amazing to integrate in a build pipeline. Thanks!

sure, I can put it on github. Just have to re-write the interface for cli instead of REST.

Woot!

This is pretty standard image processing techniques, which you can streamline yourself. Not sure if there exists out-of-the-box solutions, but you can easily create your own with for example scikit-image (python).

Here are some selected functions.

Opening: http://scikit-image.org/docs/stable/api/skimage.morphology.h...

Closing: http://scikit-image.org/docs/stable/api/skimage.morphology.h...

Dilate: http://scikit-image.org/docs/stable/api/skimage.morphology.h...

I recommend starting at the user guide: http://scikit-image.org/docs/stable/user_guide.html

And some OpenCV tutorials on those same operations:

http://docs.opencv.org/2.4/doc/tutorials/imgproc/opening_clo...

http://docs.opencv.org/2.4/doc/tutorials/imgproc/erosion_dil...

Would be nice if the image processing was implemented locally. The operations used don't seem too complicated for javascript + canvas.

Also not working on latest stable Chrome x64, upload not working, just keeps going, no errors in console.

server's at 90x but uploads do complete eventually.. just really slow right now from hn traffic!

Very useful tool! Thanks for sharing! Works perfectly on my iPhone.

This is incredibly useful, regardless of the veracity of its "computer vision."

A technique that seems to work well for it with simple drawing style icons is to thicken and simplify as the image gets smaller, so it seems like the stroke of the drawing is consistent across sizes.

really cool idea but it didn't work for me. It distorted the logo and made it look much worse. Would be great if you generated a unique url for each icon that is uploaded so i could share it with you.

That would entail them permanently storing the images, which they probably don't want to do.

Genuinely useful, and easy to use. Thanks for sharing this!

Nice, but nowadays everybody uses SVG for their icons, because they render well at normal to higher resolutions.

Resorting to a bitmap at low resolutions seems a bit odd.

This is for favicons, where svg support is pretty spotty.

Even with svg, they ultimately become rasters once they are on the screen. So for favicons it might still be beneficial to control the scaling yourself with a tool like this.

The techniques detailed on the page (reweighting lines, removing fine details) seem like a worthwhile reason to at least use a different file for the "tiny" image. Unless SVG renderers start using those techniques at a small enough size.

It looks like only Firefox or Opera would support an SVG favicon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favicon#File_format_support

The techniques (for example, removing fine details) are applicable to SVG too.

I've manually tried to hack together a few favicons. This seems like a way better solution if, like me, you don't have much design skill.

I am not sure if web site works on mobile.

Genuine question: Are people creating app icons while they're on the go? Or am I the only one who defers all development to one's laptop (or desktop) computer.

Maybe he's just trying it out on his phone?

I wanted to try a random one to see what it actually was, because i was waiting someone in the parking lot.

does the page load? more details would help me identify the issue

The page loads, but normally i see earth logo on desktop, but on phone it's just blank. This is on android chrome. Looks to be a issue with the margins/alignment of the image, i think.

thanks, I'll look into it

I did just the same, works quite well for me. Firefox on Android.

Agreed, I only work on my desktop, my phone is for not essential tasks. But we might be the minority, I’ve seen people use their tablets for Everything

Is it supposed to work with transparency? I only get black pixels instead.

Couldn’t get it to work in my iPhone . Too slow/times out

I wonder if it can be used for mip map generation.

This is beautiful.

Unrelated: Does anybody know why the favicon of http://www.fast.ai/ an "H"?

I'm going to guess it's from a legacy system and the code was copy/pasted when creating that new site... but will be interested to hear the final reason.

Based on a Google Image search of that image, I'd say "because the WordPress theme they are using sets that".

H for Jeremy Howard?

The theme is "Hyde", and that's the default favicon. https://github.com/poole/hyde

Slow but fun.

Needs title fix, this isn't really "computer vision".

maybe "basic computer vision"? dilate/erode/open/close filters come from computer vision afaik.

These kind of fundamental methods in computer vision are commonly called "image processing".

"Computer vision" typically refers to computations that have an interpretative component (image analysis), i.e. programs that actually "see" something. Interpretation basically refers to the inference of the state of the "world" (or a part thereof) from an image. Image processing is often used in pre-processing for computer vision applications, but it also has many other purposes which do not need image analysis, such as in photo and video editing, as well as in generative applications, e.g. 3D engines and video games (which can in some sense be seen as the inverse of vision). Therefore, image processing is not exactly a subset of computer vision.

at least I didn't call it AI :]

There's still time to correct that.

No but you did say:

> Discover the deep learning tech behind Brandmark

that's more referring to the other stuff on the site

Digital filters are used for other things aside computer vision.

OK we changed it to the HTML doc title.

Doesn't work.

what seems to be the problem? server getting hammered by hn traffic might have something to do with it

For all the complaining one sees on HN about bug reports from users, you'd think we could come up with something better than "Doesn't work."

    When
    I visit the site for the first time

    Then
    I expect to see something related to the title from the HN submission

    Except
    I see a blank page and an app that has broken in a fundamental way that I do not have expertise/time to look into

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