
AWS DeepLens – Deep learning enabled video camera for developers - irs
https://aws.amazon.com/deeplens/
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ryankupyn
This is neat but sort of strange - I love the idea of a hardware package that
makes fiddling with deep learning easy, but I wonder why Amazon went through
the trouble of producing such a relatively niche product?

If I had to guess, this is going to be a great "user education" tool for AWS,
designed to get new developers on the platform as early in the learning
process as possible.

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danvoell
Do you really think its niche? Sure its not going to be a GoPro consumer
product but the market for "smart video cameras" or whatever you want to call
video+insight is going to be pretty darn big. This seems like this easiest
foray into combining a video camera with learning with limited bandwidth
issues. My only concern is whether or not Google will come out with something
similar in the near term.

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tanilama
Surely Google will come with one. Or something under Android umbrella. Only
concern is, Google's hardware is at best meh level, while Amazon had better
reputation in that front.

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conorh
This is great for my chicken coop project :) I have been working with a
raspberry pi and camera to train a system to recognize and respond to
squirrels (close the feeder to stop them eating food). There are many other
options to build this, but it is nice that this is an integrated system that
is easy to train!

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caio1982
Please submit a post about this project, with juicy details!

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conorh
Sure will do, mostly I've been training squirrel recognition models on my
laptop and also learning what it takes to run those models on the raspberry pi
(low frame rates) with OpenCV. I did also buy one of these though
[https://www.adafruit.com/product/997](https://www.adafruit.com/product/997)
so once I get everything running I may also have videos of squirrels being
sprayed by the garden hose :)

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caio1982
If I may give some dog trainer advice, you are going to spend water and energy
making some squirrels just a bit more challenged to the feat, consider just
attracting the offending ones to elsewhere where they find some
cheap/disposable food source so they let the chicken's alone :-) — this
approach is usually cheaper and renders more results with dogs, cats and even
chickens themselves! Say, once you detect them, you lure them to a certain
path or place, maybe with some LEDs or scent or something you can automate
dispensing (I don't known squirrels).

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drewda
Related: I recently came across the "Google AIY Voice Kit for Raspberry Pi" in
the Adafruit store:
[https://www.adafruit.com/product/3602](https://www.adafruit.com/product/3602)

That, as well as this new "AWS DeepLens", look like interesting kits/toys to
try out new on-device and hosted systems for voice processing and computer
vision.

Then again, I assume you have to buy these knowing that the hardware will
likely cease to work in the next year or two or three... or whenever the
hosted aspects change, and AWS and Google move on to their next trend.

Any other similar kits/toys others have found?

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nathankunicki
Well, with the Google AIY kit, as it's Raspberry Pi based, you have the
ability to do what you want with the hardware. It's really just a microphone
and speaker on top of it.

At some point you could run offline models to take voice input and output
intent. What you then do with that is up to you. What the cloud services
provide are common lookups, such as searching wikipedia, your calendars, etc.
You'd need to implement that yourself.

AWS DeepLens seems to run Ubuntu 16.04 under the hood, but it's unknown
whether you can get SSH access to it. If so, it's could be a really nice
hackable camera on which you could run anything you want.

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hadrianpaulo
Just read from the site FAQs that it does support SSH.

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minimaxir
100 GFLOPS can process deep learning predictions on HD video in real time? I
thought even GPUs like the GTX 1080 (8.8 TFLOPS) had difficulty with that.

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joshvm
Most of the time you don't need pixel-level classification. Suppose you want
to make a cat tracker. How small can you shrink an HD image and still reliably
detect a cat (using your own brain)? Pretty small. Probably less than a
quarter of the size at least. Do you need colour? Often you can get away
without it, so that's a third of the data gone too. For full-image
classification you could go even smaller and still be accurate.

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amelius
Also, you don't have to train all the time. Most of the time, you're in
inference mode.

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dharma1
Not really sure why you would use this over an Android/iOS phone and
Tensorflow Mobile, or Jetson TX1+camera if you need more FLOPS at a small size

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tanilama
Jetson TX1 is much expensive than this one, though. As with most phones. And
most importantly, this looks like a Dropcam style camera, I think the
expectation of use case is different here.

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modeless
Jetson is a dev kit. Pricing for a consumer product with the same chip is
lower. You can get a Shield TV box for $180 today; plug in a webcam and it's
equivalent to this Amazon thing but cheaper with 10x the performance. For a
video processing application that extra performance is going to be essential.

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jweir
Perfect! I will train one of these to watch my pained facial expressions when
Alexa is triggered without using a keyword. Then it will fire a speech script
"Bad Alexa."

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BatFastard
Does that work? I usually say STFU! Which does work

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GistNoesis
Shameless related plug : We recently developed a deep-learning powered 2-axis-
gimbal for a webcam : [https://github.com/GistNoesis/Linn-
Photobooth](https://github.com/GistNoesis/Linn-Photobooth) . We do use deep-
learning either for deep-art or for pose tracking. I guess we can probably
control the gimbal with this new camera though I'm not sure It will be able to
process deep art. In my other usages, usually I have multiple cheap webcams
with cheap board (IP cams or other) streaming it (over wifi/ethernet) to the
GPU processing station located somewhere. With powerful GPU boards at €650,
it's probably a better strategy once you start having plenty of cams.

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BatFastard
That sounds cool, but after reading the webpage I am still not sure what it
actually does. It prints a picture, you can change art style, what's the point
of the gimbal?

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GistNoesis
The gimbal allows you to orient the camera (avoid people to touch the lens
with greasy fingers), it can be substituted by a cheap 3d printed piece for
manual adjustment if the functionality is not needed. It has some awe effect,
and is fun with kids. It makes the camera more alive, specially in the
tracking mode. The gimbal allows you to shoot videos where you are always at
the center. We think this may grant some freedom of movement to some video
makers and make their video more dynamic without the need of a buddy filming
them. Also this project has a DIY component to it, so doing the gimbal is a
great introduction to robotics.

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cr4ig_
Just make sure that if you're going to be discussing disconnecting DeepLens
that you turn the pod so that the camera can't read your lips.

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suyash
You can do much more with your phone's camera. I think a better use case would
have been an SDK for Android/iOS. There are several open source libraries that
you do a lot more interesting that simple object recognition.

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bluddy
They don't specify what this has to enable deep learning. Intel GPU? Atom
processor?

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drodil
"HOT DOG NOT HOT DOG" really makes it useful for adult film industry :D

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golergka
I think it's rather a Silicon Valley reference.

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BatFastard
And the amazon info site actually has a picture of a hotdog and the reference
to "HOT DOG NOT HOT DOG"

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senatorobama
Wait.. why? If you were a company developing a product based on this, why
would you want an AWS logo stamped on top?

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colinbartlett
I think it's more of a devkit. Not something you build a consumer product
around.

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modeless
Intel Atom processor? What a silly choice! A Tegra would be literally 10x
faster for machine learning. Why on Earth would anyone choose Atom for this
application?

Much better hardware for this application would be an NVIDIA Shield TV box and
a USB webcam. 10x the performance for cheaper.

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mercprof
The tiny JeVois smart camera has been doing this for a while now, and lots of
other kinds of computer vision too, although in a smaller and lower resolution
device, also much cheaper at $49 and fully open source.

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msie
How soon before someone attaches a gun and legs to this thing? (see: Portal)

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BatFastard
I know at the military level it does in the Phalanx
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS)
which basically shots a stream of lead which must require one hell of a
gimble!

I was imagining hooking up an old airsoft gun to one, legal, cheap, effective
deterrent for small animals.

This is another example of tech beating the hell out of laws.

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k_f
Am I the only one triggered by the fact that they used blue USB 2.0 ports?

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amelius
Does this device "phone home"?

