Amazon’s Rekognition technology which debuted last year, has not been sitting idle. The company has announced that the service can now recognize thousands of celebrities from a vast spectrum of categories including TV, sports, movies and so on.
Announcing the service, Amazon said:
Today we are adding celebrity recognition!
Rekognition has been trained to identify hundreds of thousands of people who are famous, noteworthy, or prominent in fields that includes politics, sports, entertainment, business, and media. The list is global, and is updated frequently.
You can access this feature by placing a call to the new RecognizeCelebrities function. In addition to the bounding box and facial landmark feature returned by the existing DetectFaces, you can also expect the service to proffer additional information — say the URL of the famous personality’s IMDB account!
This introduction gives Amazon’s Rekognition service an advantage over Google’s Vision API and brings it almost on par with Microsoft’s Cognitive Service. Almost, because Microsoft’s service can also caption the picture based upon the celebrity and the objects in the picture.
Amazon also had suggestions to offer, regarding the use case scenario for the service.
If you have an image archive you can now index it by celebrity. You could also use a combination of celebrity recognition and object detection to build all kinds of search tools. If your images are already stored in S3, you can process them in-place.
