Face swapping with Python, dlib, and OpenCV
matthewearl.github.io
matthewearl.github.io
Essentially, it is possible to replace people, objects, environments, & audio elements automatically through a series of techniques. Those techniques form the basis of a powerful advertising and message delivery infrastructure. And the collective IP is already owned by a major media conglomerate.
Had an innovative tinkerer kept it, then who knows what might have happened. But I'd take a wild guess and say that the odds are more likely that a such an innovator would allow others the use/play/profit off of their novel ideas than would a large entity that sees it as a potential avenue of competition.
I realise that people have to make money some how, but developing a useful, competitive, monetisable product that people are able to choose to buy is, in my opinion, the way forwards. Patenting the technology so that you can operate without competition rather than developing your product to stay ahead of the competition "organically" seems like the wrong way of doing it to me.
Perhaps I'm an idealist, and need to get real...
"Los Angeles based MBA..."
Makes sense, I guess you learnt this two card trick in MBA 101 :)
Thanks for the warning, at least.
:(
To some degree, patents are a mechanism forcing early technology companies into expensive legal engagements, which drain resources from the company, triggering hefty financing requirements, and a dilution of the inventor's equity.
It is a carefully crafted system that benefits the 1% entirely, and the remaining 99% are merely the crop they farm.
At the end of the day I have to be able to say that I did everything I could to make our technology "win" in the marketplace.
No, see, what'll happen is your patent will be bought up during your exit event/firesale, and then used to harass other people in the space.
Especially in AR/VR/whatever, there's a huge incentive to patent things which are fairly obvious with just a little applied engineering time, and which will be used to harass a lot of people later.
If you wanted your technology to "win", you should make it open and free (in the software sense) to use--as it is, you've just got some tepid AR entry in the backwards swamp that is AEC.
I actually ran the idea of putting our work for "free" by our current investors because I am a fan of FOSS but it's a non-starter when it comes to raising money and it's just a fact of life that we need investment to keep going.
Someone else would have done it and you would be in the same position you are now.
Why would a patent owner want to remain unknown?
Another question being is the owner of record merely a front, and for what purpose?
As for the current owner being a front... if it is, it's not a very good one (real patent troll companies are much better at it, using shell corporations in various jurisdictions, each tied to a single or a small number of patent families).
Could be wrong though.
I only had one foot in the algo camp to be honest. My main task was making the query engine scale.
Aren't patents supposed to be public information ? One of the (rather hollow in practice) justification for patents is to (also) encourage eventual disclosure of knowledge.
I disagree.
It's important that people be able to determine whether the patent is in use or held by an NPE that's obligated to license it to people who want to implement products.
Were I to want to work in motion capture, I have no way to ascertain who owns your patents, if they're an NPE, and what possible licensing options exist.
I think patent owners should be forced to register with the patent office in a look-up table if they want to hold their patents.
Private agreements can restrict a person's comment on things without regard to whether the information is already public.
Think product placements that change for every single viewer.
Real time rendering, VR/AR and that entire enchilada of media techniques completely sidestep these patents because there is no original media, it's all created and composited on the fly, dynamically for the single specific consumer of the media.
Discouraging people from exploring ideas and building things 'because its patented' is fundamentally wrong.
I bet there are a million patents out there for 'automated face replacement'. I just hope very very much, that somewhere there is some prior art that makes them all completely worthless and bankrupts whomever is making any money from them.
Who's discouraging? Being aware that it's highly patented doesn't mean you shouldn't play around with it, it just means that you probably shouldn't be trying to make money off of someone else's work.
As a quick rule of thumb, whenever people are being advised never to look at patents, as they are in software, that's when those patents do more harm than good.
Just because there are patents doesn't mean a person can't play around and even try to make money off of their work. It just means they need to do a little bit of investigation before trying to monetize their work.
To illustrate this, a patent (as originally intended at least) wouldn't be for something broad like "walking down the street" but maybe for something more like "walking down the street with a particular gait."
While I don't necessarily agree with the patent system, it detracts from the conversation with it's not an informed discussion.
When you look at the patents that Newegg fights (and wins), clearly something has gone wrong at USPTO.
edit: looking at your bio it seems pretty likely that you had properly implemented it!
Just because something looks like it could be patent encumbered doesn't mean you shouldn't pursue it. Patents need to be fought over in court. It costs millions of dollars to bring a patent lawsuit. In the event that your little side project or startup becomes a target for a patent lawsuit, frivolous or otherwise, you've likely already won.
Even with a semi-broken patent system, the world simply favors active, high-quality execution over passive "intellectual property" generation. Focus 364 days a year on a building a great product that people love and then spend a day to talk to your attorney about patents, IP, and how to protect the valuable company that you've built by focusing on your customers.
Jeff Schox has a great talk on patents and startups that is very relevant to this discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyv75d4JG7c
It is exactly the issue of fighting patents costing millions of dollars that makes technology development financially risky. When accused of infringing, one has to respond, and that response costs both significant time and significant money.
I agree a side project need not worry. A startup does. I also agree that the world favors active execution over passive intellectual property generation. Our world also forces the active executing organization to protect itself if they need any financing to realize their goals.
Also your statement "the collective IP is already owned by a major media conglomerate" if taken to refer to totality of technology which makes it "possible to replace people, objects, environments, & audio elements automatically through a series of techniques" is false.
I don't understand this. If the patents are public, why shouldn't the owners be as well?
In the 90's, there was Kai's Power Goo (now owned by Corel) and probably something similar used by Conan O'Brien's art dept. to produce the "If They Mated" segments. It's such a shame tools owned by big companies are effectively locked away from ever being marketed again by asserting IP rights.
I really think intellectual property needs a principle similar to adverse possession [0]; that is, if it's not being actively used in a meaningful, sustained venture, another shop can reboot it. (Giving capitalism the right to fork.) Btw, I'm not the first, nor the last, to conceive of this. [1]
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession
1. http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v16/16HarvJLTech327...
Well that said: https://www.reddit.com/r/gentlemangabers
(Before you go dig up the actual source code: it just uses a web service to get the coordinates of the faces)
Did you see what happened here the last time someone used Lena in their example?
By the way, I was shocked the first time I saw what the full picture looked like... 8-)
>I was shocked the first time I saw what the full picture looked like.
Me too! Ironically I probably wouldn't have ever seen the uncropped image if not for the controversy around the common use of the cropped version.
(Forgive the rushed nature of this, literally just whipped this up in the last 20 mins. Will provide a link to the menpofit model in a later revision)
[1] a gossip newspaper which often (always?) has dubious photographic evidence backing up their claims.
Had fun over the weekend playing with this system. :)