Weapons are controversial topic, especially in zones of conflict. A lot of photos of people holding weapons are posted daily in social media. Analyzing the concentration and the motives for posting this kind of photos can eventually hint to a trend or some potential problems.
In a recent post Justin Seitz showcases a simple hack for discovering photos of weapons on social media using Imagga’s image recognition API. Not all photos of people with weapons are being detected by our general tagging API, but there’s a simple explanation behind that – the API hasn’t been specifically trained for that task. Still, it’s quite amazing we are detecting various types of weapons in different context.
Applications of this are numerous: detecting concentration of weapon related photos and possible militarization in certain area, unauthorized/hazardous use of weapons, including by children to name a few.
Justin has also managed to improve the results by cropping some of the images in advance, so they are more concentrated on the eventual weapon. In the upcoming updates of our API this will be solved even better – we are releasing positional tagging of objects soon and besides having the actual position this will also improve the object-level recognition, stay tuned!
In addition to the very interesting use-case Justin’s article is a great practical guide on how to use the Imagga’s auto-tagging API so make sure to check it out.