Introducing PixLab's New Privacy Policy, DMCA Guidelines, and Terms of Use

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We are excited to announce important updates to the Privacy Policy, DMCA Guidelines, and Terms of Services of the PixLab Websites, Cloud Services, and APIs.

At PixLab, we strive to provide our users with the highest level of transparency, security, and control over their personal data. These updates align with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) to ensure compliance and protect your privacy.

New Privacy Policy: Safeguarding Your Data, Respecting Your Privacy

Our revamped Privacy Policy puts your privacy at the forefront. We understand the significance of your personal information and have implemented robust measures to protect it. This policy outlines the types of data we collect, how we use it, and how we ensure its security. Additionally, it informs you about your rights and the choices you have regarding your data.

To learn more about our privacy practices, including data collection, usage, storage, and your rights as a user, we invite you to review our updated privacy policy available at https://pixlab.io/privacy-policy. By continuing to use the PixLab APIs, you are agreeing to the revised policy

DMCA Guidelines: Protecting Copyrighted Material

At PixLab, we respect intellectual property rights and take copyright infringement seriously. Our DMCA Guidelines outline the steps to report any content that infringes upon your copyrights. We have implemented a streamlined process to ensure prompt and efficient handling of DMCA takedown requests.

If you believe your copyrighted material is being used improperly on PixLab, please follow the instructions provided in our DMCA guidelines, which can be found within our terms of use at https://pixlab.io/dmca.

Terms of Service: A New Framework for Collaboration

Our terms of services define the rules and regulations for using PixLab's website and APIs. By using our services, you agree to abide by these terms and conditions. They cover a range of important aspects, including user responsibilities, content ownership, limitations of liability, and more.

We encourage you to familiarize yourself with our terms of use, available at https://pixlab.io/terms, to understand your rights and obligations when using PixLab.

Your Trust Matters

As a user of PixLab, your trust is of utmost importance to us. We are committed to maintaining the highest standards of privacy and data protection. These updates to our Privacy Policy, DMCA Guidelines, and Terms of Services aim to provide you with increased control, transparency, and legal compliance.

We value your feedback and are constantly working to improve our services. If you have any questions or concerns about these updates or any aspect of PixLab, please reach out to our support team via our various communication channels.

Finally, we thank you for choosing PixLab as your trusted platform for image and video processing. We look forward to continuing our journey together while prioritizing your privacy and security.

Full Scan Support for United Arab Emirates (UAE) ID/Residence Cards

The PixLab Document Scanner, development team is pleased to announce that is now fully support scanning Emirates (UAE) ID & Residence Cards via the /DOCSCAN API endpoint at real-time using your favorite programming language.

When invoked, the /DOCSCAN HTTP API endpoint shall Extract (crop) any detected face and transform the raw UAE ID/Residence Card content such as holder name, nationality, ID number, etc. into a JSON object ready to be consumed by your app.

Below, a typical output result of the /DOCSCAN API endpoint for an Emiratis (UAE) ID card input sample:

Input Emirates (UAE) ID Card

UAE ID card specimen

Extracted UAE ID Card Fields

UAE extracted fields

The code samples used to achieve such result are available to consult via the following gists:

The same logic applies to scanning official travel documents like Visas, Passports, and ID Cards from many others countries in an unified manner, regardless of the underlying programming language used on your backend (Python, PHP, Ruby, JS, etc.) thanks to the DOCSCAN API endpoint as shown in previous blog posts:

Algorithm Details

Internally, PixLab's document scanner engine is based on PP-OCR which is a practical ultra-lightweight OCR system, mainly composed of three parts: DB text detection, detection frame correction, and CRNN text recognition. DB stands for Real-time Scene Text Detection.

PP-OCR: A Practical Ultra Lightweight OCR System - Algorithm Overview

PP-OCR Algorithm Overview

The system adopts 19 effective strategies from 8 aspects including backbone network selection and adjustment, prediction head design, data augmentation, learning rate transformation strategy, regularization parameter selection, pre-training model use, and automatic model tailoring and quantization to optimize and slim down the models of each module.

In PP-OCR, Differentiable Binarization (DB) is used as text detector which is based on a simple segmentation network. It integrates feature extraction and sequence modeling. It adopts the Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss to avoid the inconsistency between prediction and label.

The algorithm is further optimized in five aspect where the detection model adopts the CML (Collaborative Mutual Learning) knowledge distillation strategy and CopyPaste data expansion strategy. The recognition model adopts the LCNet lightweight backbone network, U-DML knowledge distillation strategy and enhanced CTC loss function improvement, which further improves the inference speed and prediction effect.

PixLab API 1.9.72 Released!

The PixLab development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the PixLab API 1.9.72.

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Since its launch on 2017, PixLab have already processed over 450 Millions of users contents whether static images, GIF or Videos Frames. This milestone release introduces new API endpoints, various minor bug fixes, processing speed improvements by up to 5% and many innovative features. Let's start with the one we are existed about in no particular order:

  • Passports & ID Cards Scan: While documents scanning were introduced in earlier version of the PixLab API via the /docscan endpoint. This release pushes further the accuracy of the OCR engine. A 5MB raw Passport sample now takes less than 3 seconds to execute including face detection & extraction, MRZ (Machine Readable Zone) extraction and finally transformation of the Raw MRZ data into textual content. You can try out the accuracy of the Passport scanning engine using these Python and PHP scripts to see it in action.
  • DNS infrastructure moved to Cloudflare for faster than ever response times.
  • Full support for HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 (QUIC).
  • Up to three layers of redundancy for the standard PixLab OCR engine for faster, accurate & guaranteed scan results.
  • A fresh update of the adult & gore content detection ML model which is used to power the famous PixLab /NSFW API endpoint that have already analyzed over 100 millions of user contents with high accuracy.
  • Face Detection (including facial landmarks extraction) & Emotion Pattern (including gender & age) extraction are now using the RetinaFace Model which scores the highest on the LFW dataset.
  • The /docscan API endpoint now fully support scanning ID cards from Malaysia & Singapore and many other countries (at users request) as well the brand new India Aadhar ID card. Find out more information about Aadhard fully support via our blog announcement here.
  • Finally, a brand new, high performance custom image processing layer written in C/C++ and powered by ImageMagick and our Embedded computer Vision Library SOD is integrated directly into our cloud API.

Pixlab customers are more than advised to take a look at The official API endpoints documentation, The Samples Page, The Github repository for additional information.

Finally, for potentially interested users, you are more than welcome to start a 7 days free trial to see the API in action. Simply head to the PixLab Dashboard and activate your free trial from there.

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PixLab on Social Media Platforms

Follow PixLab on social media to keep up-to-date with the latest company news, research highlights and benefit from a range of useful resources including (but not limited to) our brand new API services such the state-of-the-art Passports & ID Cards scanning API, the new facial recognition engine which achieve 99.8% success ratio and many more API endpoints for building intelligent applications.

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Don't forget! You can instantly reach our support team via the PixLab dashboard and we always guaranty a response in 48 business hours timeframe for your integration and support assistance!

Milestone Reached for the PixLab NSFW API Endpoint

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:

blurred image

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.