I was recently invited to the first alpha release of Google Cloud Vision, which is a game changing new API from Google. I can programmatically upload any picture and get this kind of stuff back:
- Face detection, with pixel annotations of the corner of the mouth etc, plus unexpected values like sorrowLikelihood
- Landmark detection, with LatLon polygon boundaries to real world landmarks
- Logo detection
- Text detection
- Safe search detection, which can detect medical, nude and violent content
I wanted to dig right in, and decided to build a really silly little game. I call it Game Of Cats, and has nothing to do with Game of Thrones at all.
A user logs in using their Instagram credentials. My game engine starts polling all recent pictures from the people the user follows, and awards a point for every cat picture that occurs. The game goes on forever, without any interaction.
I won’t bore you with details about how Instagram handles OAUTH, but you might be interested in how Google Cloud Vision wants to talk to an app like this? I built this quick and dirty as it should be, in PHP.
| function fetch_tags_for_image($path){ | |
| $tags = []; | |
| $payload = '{"requests": [{"image": {"content": "'.base64_encode(file_get_contents($path)).'"}, "features": [{"type": "LABEL_DETECTION", "maxResults": "10"}]}]}'; | |
| file_put_contents('payload.json', $payload); | |
| $cmd = 'curl -k -s -H "Content-Type: application/json" https://vision.googleapis.com/v1alpha1/images:annotate?key=GOOGLEAPIKEY --data-binary @payload.json'; | |
| exec($cmd, $result); | |
| if($json = @json_decode(join($result, "\n"))){ | |
| foreach($json->responses[0]->labelAnnotations as $tag){ | |
| $tags[] = $tag->description; | |
| } | |
| } | |
| return $tags; | |
| } |
by I would love to have the energy to build a WordPress plugin that adds a taxonomy to the media library, and automatically tags all uploaded images using Google Cloud Vision, but I don’t. Someone else will, and they write better code than I do anyway.
/Peder
Note: I can’t post the URL to the actual game, yet. The alpha’s terms and conditions prohibits me from deploying to production.