Image Recognition - a first look

Does auto-classification of images work?

There is a trend toward "Analtyics-as-a-Service" where companies can leverage specialized functions on demand. There are predictive modeling options like IBM's Watson and MonkeyLearn for text modeling. There are even image recognition options emerging that offer auto-classification.

And as part of a personal interest on figuring out how content works I'm experimenting with various ways of tagging content - images, descriptions, and reviews - to see what might emerge.

So as a test I submitted the following picture to a service I found: imagga.

Red Duvet

So, here's what came back as suggested tags.

• Shopping cart
• 3d
• People
• Man
• ...
• Jukebox

Not exactly what I would have picked...so I did it again.

This seemed to produce more useful tags (and had higher confidence scores).

• Sofa
• Furniture
• Bed
• Interior
• ...
• Relaxation

The tags come with confidence scores - not sure what they mean yet - but the scores for the second picture were higher. Definitely an interesting learning exercise. More to follow...