Amazon Rekognition : The next step towards image recognition

Amazon Rekognition with a 'k' is an image detection and recognition service, which surely can be called as the next step in deep learning-based image analysis. This service can recognize objects, scenes and faces in the picture using deep learning technology and returns a matching response from billions of resources available online.

It uses deep neural network models to detect and label thousands of objects and scenes in the images, and is continually adding new labels and facial recognition features to the service. Rekognition’s API enables you to quickly add sophisticated deep learning-based visual search and image classification to your applications.This will greatly help in different domains wherever there is a need for image analysis, be it Law enforcement, medical, auto, insurance or entertainment.

Just imagine a smart security camera enabled by Amazon Rekogintion that can visually recognize family members and trusted friends, unlock the door, turn on the lights, and adjust the temperature.

You can try Amazon Rekognition if you have an AWS account. Rekognition is available under Artificial Intelligence in AWS console.

It provides you with a simple user interface where you can upload an image and get matching response on the right.

Facial Analysis

Advance deep learning technology enables you to identify not only the object and faces in the scene but the emotions as well, by performing a Facial Analysis. For example, for the picture shown on the right, Amazon Rekognition can not only detect the gender of the person or sun glasses, but it also returns the confidence scores for different emotions with labels like 'smiling' 99.4% or 'appears to be happy' 93.2%.

Celebrity Recognition

The fun part of Amazon Rekognition is Celebrity Recognition, it recognizes thousands of individuals who are famous, noteworthy, or prominent in their field. 

The API provides the name and unique id of the celebrity, confidence of the match, and URLs pointing to related content for the celebrity, for example, the celebrity's IMDB link.

For Developers

Developers can use AWS Lambda blueprints for Rekognition that makes it easy to initiate image analysis based on events in your AWS data stores such as Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB.

Rekognition provides a hierarchical list of labels with confidence scores to enable fine-grained control over what images you want to allow. With its rich context and information, you can enable visual search, discovery, and authentication in your applications. A more logical expression can be formed using the confidence scores for various categories important for a consensus. 

Although there are other market players such Google’s Vision API or Microsoft’s Cognitive Services, which provides similar image recognition and analysis services, Amazon's Rekognition has definitely outperformed others and provides far more features.