For far too long image understanding has been considered too complex for the machines to deal with. It takes years of training for the human brain to build links between the visible and connect it to concepts of shapes, colors and objects. Even though neural networks were invented couple of decades ago and were considered huge step into machine AI, what lacked was computing power. With the advance of GPU computing, new opportunities were discovered, algorithms were reinvented so machine and deep learning are back on the table.
The machines are powerful enough now to grasp the world almost as good as a 3 years old kid. A prerequisite for neural network to work well is a clear, representative data that will make the outcome results more precise and accurate. Huge efforts to collect and classify the images of the world were undertaken in the last couple of years. Are the machines ready for a battle then?
At Imagga we take that challenge seriously by building an intelligent image recognition technology that can teach the machine to understand basic daily life objects, comprehend concepts and eventually deal with complex pictures, where lots of background information needs to be taken into account in order to be interpreted properly. It’s challenging task but we love what we do.
With that stated, we are ready to set the stage for an epic battle, the battle of the century – machines vs humans. To some it might sound funny, unrealistic, pretentious, but it’s coming. At least now in a form of a cool game, done with love by Imagga and Algolia.
We’ve called it Human vs. Robot: Chash Of The Image Tags. You will be taking central role of judging who tags better – the human or the machine. You will be presented two sets of images for a given text tag and need to vote for the set that better represents the concept of the text tag. As every good judges you will need to be unbiased and make up your mind only on the facts, so you will not know which set was tagged by humans or respectively by machines. You will get five rounds to decide and pronounce a winner. Of course you can play as many times as you wish, and even invite your friends to try it out and have fun.
The game is made possible by the joined efforts of Algolia and Imagga. Algolia is building powerful search technology for exploration of large data sets. Algolia’s hosted search API delivers instant and relevant results as you type your search query. Imagga’s part is to provide the automated machine tagging of all the images you will be seeing in the search results.
It might be just a game, but the real idea is to demonstrate how powerful machine recognition is nowadays. It can really replace or at least greatly assist people in the process of tagging photos – it’s much faster, more cost effective, most of the time – more consistent and even more precise than human tagging. This empowers a lot of use-cases in stock photography, digital asset management, advertising, cloud storage and photo sharing that are otherwise not feasible or even not possible with human tagging.
Why don’t you play and judge for yourself Clash of the image tags!