PixLab Blog

The PixLab Computer Vision team is pleased to announce that a milestone have been reached for the Not Safe For Work API endpoint. Over the course of the last 12 months, the /nsfw API endpoint have already analyzed millions of our user's media files with high accuracy.

For those not familiar with this endpoint. /nsfw let you detect not suitable for work (i.e. nudity & adult) content in a given image or video frame. NSFW is of particular interest, if mixed with some media processing API endpoints like /blur, /encrypt or /mogrify to censor images on the fly according to their nsfw score.

A typical blurred image with a high NSFW score should look like the following:

To obtain such image result, two endpoints were actually used:

• /NSFW is the analysis endpoint that must be called first. It does perform nudity & adult content detection and return a score value between 0..1. The more this value approaches 1, the more your picture/frame is highly nsfw.
• /blur is called later only if the nsfw score value returned earlier is greater than certain threshold. In our case, it is set to 0.5.

The Python code below was used to generate the blurred picture programmatically without any human intervention. This can help you automate things such as verifying user's uploads:

import requests
import json

# Target Image: Change to any link (Possibly adult) you want or switch to POST if you want to upload your image directly, refer to the sample set for more info.
img = 'https://i.redd.it/oetdn9wc13by.jpg' 
# Your PixLab key
key = 'Pixlab_Key'

# Censor an image according to its NSFW score
req = requests.get('https://api.pixlab.io/nsfw',params={'img':img,'key':key})
reply = req.json()
if reply['status'] != 200:
    print (reply['error'])
elif reply['score'] < 0.5 :
    print ("No adult content were detected on this picture")
else:
    # Highly NSFW picture
    print ("Censoring NSFW picture...")
    # Call blur with the highest possible radius and sigma
    req = requests.get('https://api.pixlab.io/blur',params={'img':img,'key':key,'rad':50,'sig':30})
    reply = req.json()
    if reply['status'] != 200:
        print (reply['error'])
    else:
        print ("Censored image: "+ reply['link'])

Finally, the official endpoint documentation is available to consult at https://pixlab.io/cmd?id=nsfw and a set of working samples in various programming language are available at the PixLab samples pages.

The SOD development team just published a new computer vision article on how to detect vehicles registration plates without heavy Machine Learning techniques, just standard image processing routines already implemented in the SOD library. The article is available to consult here.

Good news for PixLab customers!

The /facemotion endpoint now besides outputting the rectangle coordinates for each detected human face, you'll be able to accurately extract their gender, age and emotion pattern via their facial shapes in just a matter of few milliseconds thanks to our newly deployed machine learning models hosted on OVH and AWS instances simultaneously for worldwide availability.

Below a Python sample to show you how easy is to predict the Age and Gender of any human face.

import requests
import json

# Detect all human faces present in a given image and try to guess their age, gender and emotion state via their facial shapes

# Target image: Feel free to change to whatever image holding as many human faces as you want
img = 'http://www.scienceforums.com/uploads/1282315190/gallery_1625_35_9165.jpg'

req = requests.get('http://api.pixlab.io/facemotion',params={
    'img': img,
    'key':'PixLab_API_Key',
})
reply = req.json()
if reply['status'] != 200:
    print (reply['error'])
    exit();

total = len(reply['faces']) # Total detected faces
print(str(total)+" faces were detected")
# Extract each face now 
for face in reply['faces']:
    cord = face['rectangle']
    print ('Face coordinate: width: ' + str(cord['width']) + ' height: ' + str(cord['height']) + ' x: ' + str(cord['left']) +' y: ' + str(cord['top']))
    # Guess emotion
    for emotion in face['emotion']:
        if emotion['score'] > 0.5:
            print ("Emotion - "+emotion['state']+': '+str(emotion['score']))
    # Grab the age and gender
    print ("Age ~: " + str(face['age']))
    print ("Gender: " + str(face['gender']))

You can visit the PixLab Github repository for additional code samples in various programming languages including PHP and Java.

The PixLab team is pleased to announce major enhancement to the /tagimg endpoint.

The image labeling endpoint let you programmatically generates a description of an image in human readable language with complete sentences. The description is based on the visual content as reported by our state-of-the-art image labeling algorithm. More than one description can be generated for each image. Descriptions are ordered by their confidence score. All descriptions are in English.

the /tagimg endpoint documentation is available to consult here and below a working Python code sample:

import requests
import json

# Tag an image based on detected visual content which mean running a CNN on top of it.

# Target Image
img = 'https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/35/d0/f6/35d0f6ee0e40306c41cfd714c625f78e.jpg' 
# Your PixLab key
key = 'My_PixLab_Key'

req = requests.get('https://api.pixlab.io/tagimg',params={'img':img,'key':key})
reply = req.json()
if reply['status'] != 200:
    print (reply['error'])
else:
    total = len(reply['tags']) # Total tags
    print ("Total tags: "+str(total))
    for tag in reply['tags']:
        print("Tag: "+tag['name']+" - Confidence: "+str(tag['confidence']))

You can visit the PixLab Github repository for additional code samples in various programming languages.

The PixLab team is pleased to introduce the PDF to Image API endpoint which let you convert any PDF file to a high resolution JPEG/PNG image format.

the /pdftoimg endpoint documentation is available to consult here and below a working Python code sample:

import requests
import json

# Convert a PDF document to JPEG/PNG image via /pdftoimg endpoint.

req = requests.get('https://api.pixlab.io/pdftoimg',params={
  'src':'https://www.getharvest.com/downloads/Invoice_Template.pdf',
  'export': 'jpeg',
  'key':'My_PixLab_Key'
})
reply = req.json()
if reply['status'] != 200:
    print (reply['error'])
else:
    print ("Link to the image output (Converted PDF page): "+ reply['link'])

You can visit the PixLab Github repository for additional code samples in various programming languages.

Symisc Systems is pleased to release the first major version of the SOD library! SOD is an embedded, modern cross-platform computer vision and machine learning software library that expose a set of APIs for deep-learning, advanced media analysis & processing including real-time, multi-class object detection and model training on embedded systems with limited computational resource and IoT devices.

SOD was built to provide a common infrastructure for computer vision applications and to accelerate the use of machine perception in open source as well commercial products.

Notable SOD features

• Built for real world and real-time applications.
• State-of-the-art, CPU optimized deep-neural networks including the brand new, exclusive RealNets architecture.
• Patent-free, advanced computer vision algorithms.
• Support major image format.
• Simple, clean and easy to use API.
• Brings deep learning on limited computational resource, embedded systems and IoT devices.
• Easy interpolatable with OpenCV or any other proprietary API.
• Pre-trained models available for most architectures.
• CPU capable, RealNets model training.
• Production ready, cross-platform, high quality source code.
• SOD is dependency free, written in C, compile and run unmodified on virtually any platform & architecture with a decent C compiler.
• Amalgamated - All SOD source files are combined into a single C file (sod.c) for easy deployment.
• Open-source, actively developed & maintained product.
• Developer friendly support channels.

Programming Interfaces

The documentation works both as an API reference and a programming tutorial. It describes the internal structure of the library and guides one in creating applications with a few lines of code. Note that SOD is straightforward to learn, even for new programmer.

SOD in 5 minutes or less

A quick introduction to programming with the SOD Embedded C/C++ API with real-world code samples implemented in C.

C/C++ API Reference Guide

This document describes each API function in details. This is the reference document you should rely on.

SOD Github Repository

The official Github repository.

C/C++ Code Samples

Real world code samples on how to embed, load models and start experimenting with SOD.

As requested by our users, our /OCR endpoint gets more support for various languages including Arabic, Modern Hebrew, Russian & simplified Chinese.

bounding box coordinates are now enabled by default. For each request, besides the full text output, you get a bbox array where each entry of this array hold the target word and its bounding box (i.e. rectangle) coordinates. Each entry in this array is identified by an instance of the following JSON object:

{
    word: Extracted word,
    x: X coordinate of the top left corner,
    y: Y coordinate of the top left corner,
    w: Width of the rectangle that englobe this word,
    h: Height of the rectangle that englobe this word
}

The documentation is updated and available to consult at https://pixlab.io/cmd?id=ocr and a Python sample is provided on Github at https://github.com/symisc/pixlab/blob/master/python/ocr.py.

With that in hand, you can further tune your analysis phase for example by extracting each word via /crop and perform another pass if desired.

The PixLab engineering team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the Real-Time ASCII Art C/C++ Rendering Library.

ASCII Art is a single file C/C++ library that let you transform an input image or video frame into printable ASCII characters at real-time using a single decision tree. Real-time performance is achieved by using pixel intensity comparison inside internal nodes of the tree.

1. For a general overview on how the algorithm works, please visit the demonstration page at https://art.pixlab.io.
2. The Github Repository at https://github.com/symisc/ascii_art.
3. The ASCII Art API at https://pixlab.io/art.