Bourdakos’ Code Pattern, called “Create a real-time object detection app using Watson Machine Learning,” relies on a tool called Cloud Annotations. It’s basically a blueprint for training an AI model to recognize whatever objects you train it on, with a tool that makes labeling your data dead simple. According to Bourdakos’ LinkedIn post on the project: Using Cloud Annotations and the Code Pattern is relatively simple. Bourdakos and IBM published a tutorial, which you can view here, that takes developers through the entire process: If this all seems too easy to be true, it’s because it is. Kind of. In essence you aren’t actually training an AI model using these steps, you’re re-training it. IBM’s already trained the AI on millions of images to teach it a myriad of computer vision capabilities. It already understands things like curved lines and shadows. You’re just teaching it to recognize the images you’re annotating. But there’s still a lot of cool and useful stuff you can do with it: And if you’re not sure whether you have enough experience developing AI models to use Cloud Annotations, fret not. TNW asked Bourdakos if this was only for experts, he told us: If you’ve ever wanted to roll your own object detection AI models, or you’re just looking for a fun project to get into machine learning with, Cloud Annotation and Bourdakos’ object recognition project, or one of IBM’s other Code Patterns, might just be the starting point you’re looking for.
