Mobile Photo Perspectives: AI: it’s time to take image recognition beyond auto-tagging

September 21, 2017September 21, 2017 GaryPageau Mobile Photo Connect

Hans Hartman at Suite 48a offers an interesting perspective on the potential for depth imaging in his weekly Mobile Photo Perspectives newsletter. Here’s an excerpt:

At Mobile Photo Connect we’ve covered AI from the days when AI-based image recognition technologies first left the realm of academics and morphed into apps and services for automatically classifying consumers’ image collections.

Three years ago we enjoyed having on stage Matt Zeiler, discussing the products of his then 2-person startup, Clarifai (the company now has 55+ employees, has raised $40M, and is reportedly valued at $120M). The same year we also had Yi Li, CEO of Orbeus, share her perspectives on image recognition (Orbeus has since been acquired by Amazon and its technology supplies many of the face and image recognition features in Amazon Photos).

Fast forward to today. AI for face recognition and auto-tagging images (“find my photos with cats in them”) has matured so much that it has become a commodity, while innovative new AI applications are being developed both inside and outside our consumer imaging industry (think of camera-equipped self-driving cars that interpret visual information in real-time, for instance).

In the consumer imaging space, we’re moving beyond auto-tagging and starting to leverage new AI-based training models to help or inspire photo-enthused consumers in innovative ways. In our AI is ready for primetime: how to use AI in the next-generation photo apps and servicespanel we’ll explore how AI can be used for intelligent auto-curation of images, auto-enhancement of images, auto-creation of artistic effects, and intelligent capture of images, just to name a few areas in which AI is currently being explored.

We are very pleased to dive into these – and many other AI – topics with the following panelists: