Facebook has just announced a new upgrade that will revolutionise the way photos become available in searches. The computer vision platform makes it much easier for someone to search through photos, even without the proper tags or content description.
Forget all the frustration that derives from not being able to track down your photos or the photos of your friends. Now with the new effort of Facebook, things get better!
For example, if you check out “black shirt photos”, you will get all the results that include black shirts from your photo gallery. There is no need for you to tag the specific keywords. This, of course, expands the results, as you can imagine. The only thing you cannot do without is the content.
You cannot get results from photos whose content you cannot recall. Facebook is not to blame for that, though! The software has facilitated the process a great deal, after the previous upgrade that has made things easier for people with impaired vision.
The platform they use on Facebook is Lumos, and they have built it on FBLearner Flow. Facebook aims at improving automatic alt text (AAT) for photos through this platform.
Besides objects, now the descriptions available for photo identification include actions. This makes things even easier for the whole procedure of photo searches. The most relevant pictures become available for you in a jiffy, and this is a real revelation.
To achieve such results, the team of Facebook had to process over tens of millions of photos. This is hard work, to say the least! And AI is still not over. This is, of course, a great leap forward, but there is still a lot of work to do. Deep learning and a neural network offered impressive results, which are being continually upgraded.
It is worth noting that DeepMask and SharpMask are open sources, meaning that the way Facebook understands photos is free and out there!
As per the quote of a Facebook spokesperson from back in the summer: “We open source our code and publish our discoveries as academic papers freely available from open-access sites and want to encourage others to make it easier to share techniques and technologies,”. This highlights the importance of such a discovery in the digital era.
Facebook has taken a huge step towards better understanding of pictures. Not only for the people with impaired vision but for everyone else, the search for photos online is becoming a lot easier. AI is here, and everyone is looking forward to the next step!
Top/Featured Image: By Geralt / Pixabay
