SkyBiometry: Cloud-based Face Detection and Recognition API | Hacker News Reader

SkyBiometry: Cloud-based Face Detection and Recognition API

skybiometry.com

21 pointsadmp15 comments

Their demo seems to be over quota, getting this error:

API_KEY_USAGE_PASSED_QUOTA - app passed hourly face operation usage quota

(edit- it's back now. The demo behaves well but it did identify my grandmother as "male".)

Computer vision is a tough thing. Sometimes even Schwarzenegger is identified as female. But overall we reach quite good accuracy on determining gender from face.

Yeah I totally understand that- even humans have trouble sometimes. I'm surprised you even tackled that since everything else seemed to be pretty good.

Just out of curiosity what are some things you expect people to use the gender selection for? I could imagine a toy app that puts hats on people and, if the gender confidence is high, assigns them a "female" or "male" style hat (and a more unisex style if the confidence is lower).

Gender estimation is a must-have feature in modern face detection / recognition software. However, I'm not sure where it is used in real-life besides targeted advertising or some toy applications as you mentioned. For now, we will leave it for our users to decide how to use this feature.

Why did we added it? Well, "because we could".

I tried a few drawings just for fun. Success seemed to correlate with how photo-real the artist's style happened to be. But is this recognition? (Other than for male/female.)

Face recognition is not demonstrated online yet. But it can be accessed via API. Sign up to try recognition in your application.

This might be indicative of where my head is at on this lovely day, but I was anticipating this to be some sort of webcam pointed skyward pareidolia project.

To do: sign up for this, hook it up to a webcam, point it at the sky, and try to do face detection on clouds.

This sounds similar to what face.com was offering... as a developer any major difference I should be aware of?

This is intended to be a drop-in replacement (sign in, create namespace, update the endpoint address to http://api.skybiometry.com/fc/ and use your old code) for face detection and recognition. Detection of some face attributes is still missing but we are working on it. And we use our computer vision algorithms, so expect slightly different results.

I'm always a little worried about using this sort of service when they don't provide pricing info.

Yeah, pricing is not ready yet. Our plan is to leave 5000 face detection/recognition method calls per month for a free plan. We are still working on other plans, check us in a week or two for that.

And this kids, is how SkyNet started.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com