Amazon Rekognition: What is it and How does it Work?
Provided its immense popularity among business owners and developers, Amazon web services or AWS doesn’t need any introduction. AWS is an online cloud computing platform that offers servers, storage, remote computing, networking, security, blockchain, containers, cloud migration, automotive, machine learning, robotics, and many other services to enhance customer experience. Amazon Web Services owns almost twice as much of the cloud market as its nearest competitor.
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Some of AWS’s renowned solutions are EC2, Lambda, S3, Redshift, Kinesis, ECS, DynamoDB, Sagemaker, Rekognition, Comprehend and so on. In today’s blog, we will discuss one of Amazon’s machine learning products - AWS Rekognition, how it works and how to get started with it.
What Is Amazon Rekognition?
Amazon Rekognition is an image and video analysis service provided by AWS. Using Amazon Rekognition, you can easily add video and image analysis to your application. You just have to provide a video or an image to the Rekognition API and it will automatically identify people, objects, texts, activities and scenes. Not only that but Amazon Rekognition also detects inappropriate content in an image or video as well.
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Amazon Rekognition is based on the highly scalable, deep learning technology that is developed by Amazon’s vision scientists to examine billions of videos and images regularly. You can even use Amazon Rekognition when you don’t have hands-on experience with machine learning. Amazon Rekognition comes with a simple API that is easy-to-use and can efficiently analyze any image or video stored in the Amazon S3 bucket. Rekognition learns from new data offered by Amazon, enabling new labels and facial comparison features.
Use Cases of Amazon Rekognition
You must be thinking about where I will use Amazon Rekognition, right? So, let us help you understand its use cases.
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User Verification Through Face
An application using Amazon Rekognition can verify user identity by comparing their live image with a stored reference image.
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Sentiment and Demographic Analysis
Rekognition interprets expressions like surprise, happy or sad along with demographic details such as the gender of the person from facial images. After interpreting, Amazon Rekognition analyzes images and shares the demographic and emotional attributes to Amazon’s RedShift service that helps in detecting periodic trend reporting such as similar scenarios.
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Searchable Video and Image Libraries
With Amazon Rekognition, you can easily search stored images and videos to discover scenes and objects appearing in them.
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Face Search
Amazon Rekognition enables you to search images, videos for faces that match those stored in a container called face collection. A face collection is an index of faces that one owns and manages.
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Easy detection of Personal Protective Equipment
Industries such as manufacturing, food processing, healthcare or construction require their workers to wear personal protective equipment like hand covers, face covers and headcovers for their safety. With the help of Amazon Rekognition, you can automatically determine if a person is wearing a certain PPE or not and send notifications to remind that person or identify places that need safety warnings.
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Text Recognition
Using Amazon Rekognition, you can also detect text in an image. It supports most fonts, even highly stylized ones. In social media applications, Amazon Rekognition’s Text can be used to allow visual search depending on the index of images containing similar keywords. In public safety applications, it can be used to identify vehicles based on their license plate numbers from images taken by street cameras.
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Detecting unsafe content
If you want to avoid any violent or adult content in images or videos posted on your application by users, Amazon Rekognition can help. Developers of your application can use the returned metadata to filter unsuitable content according to your business needs. Apart from flagging the unsafe content, the Rekognition API also returns a hierarchical label list with a confidence score to indicate a specific category.
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Top-Level Category |
Second-Level Category |
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Explicit Nudity |
Nudity Graphic Male Nudity Graphic Female Nudity Sexual Activity Illustrated Explicit Nudity Adult Toys |
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Suggestive |
Female Swimwear Or Underwear Male Swimwear Or Underwear Partial Nudity Barechested Male Revealing Clothes Sexual Situations |
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Violence |
Graphic Violence Or Gore Physical Violence Weapon Violence Weapons Self Injury |
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Visually Disturbing |
Emaciated Bodies Corpses Hanging Air Crash Explosions And Blasts |
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Rude Gestures |
Middle Finger |
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Drugs |
Drug Products Drug Use Pills Drug Paraphernalia |
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Tobacco |
Tobacco Products Smoking |
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Alcohol |
Drinking Alcoholic Beverages |
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Gambling |
Gambling |
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Hate Symbols |
Nazi Party White Supremacy Extremist |
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Detection of Custom Labels
Amazon Rekognition even allows businesses to identify objects or scenes in an image or video that are specific to their business. It will help you to find your product on a store shelf, logo in social media posts, infected or unhealthy plants or animated characters in a video.
Conclusion
Amazon Rekognition is designed to work effortlessly with other services offered by AWS like AWS Lambda or AWS S3. And by integrating AWS Rekognition in your application, you are integrating a powerful, scalable, deep-learning-based image and video analysis. Moreover, in Amazon Rekognition you only pay for the videos and images that you analyze and facial metadata stored by you.
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Now that you know its use cases, you can easily determine if your business needs Amazon Rekognition. With the help of an experienced development team, you can integrate Amazon Rekognition into your business to make detection, verification, demographic analysis work easier.
