Facebook Guesses What's In Pictures To Help Visually Impaired (cio.com)

Reader itwbennett writes: Taking the issue of bad image metadata into its own hands, starting today, Facebook will tell users of screen readers what appears in the photos on their timeline. Jeremy Kirk explains: "To describe the images, Facebook built a computer vision system with a neural network trained to recognize a number of concepts, including places and the presence of people and objects. It analyzes each image for the presence of different elements, and then composes a short sentence describing it that is included in the web page as the 'alt' text of the image."These users are often neglected by technology companies. Which is why it's encouraging to see Facebook address the issue. Twitter also recently took a step to improve the user experience of visually impaired people on its social networking website.

Comments

Source code leaked

[Anonymous Coward]

if image.has('eyes')
    return 'cat';
else if image.has('plate')
    return 'food';
else if image.compressionArtifacts > 0.5
    return 'motivational poster';
else
    return 'selfie';

What could possibly go wrong?

[Prien715]

Google tried this a while ago and came up with hilariously racist results.

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

I wonder what's hilarious in those 6 photos: the algorithm correctly interprets 5 out of 6 lo-res photos. For anyone involved in artificial vision research, that's an amazing achievement.

As to the 6th photo, seriously, political-correctness aside, it doesn't seem far-fetched that a computer would interpret a close-up photo of black people as gorillas goofing around in front of a camera. Hell, I bet a human being with bad eyesight could've made that mistake too. There's nothing racist about it: human beings do look like apes sometimes because, well, that's what they are, And black people can look like gorillas to a computer, because gorillas usually sport a dark skin tone. Me, I'm amazed that the computer recognized an ape at all - be it a real ape or an evolved ape.

"Help the visually impaired" my foot

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

All this tells me is that Facebook is actively developing new, innovative ways to invade your privacy, and this particular bit of data mining technology has become reliable enough that they felt it would be good PR to create a feel-good, help-the-disabled feature out of it.

Somehow Facebook being able to interpret the contents of photos doesn't make me warm and fuzzy...