

Kittydar – Face detection for cats - artur_
http://harthur.github.com/kittydar/

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ot
Also check out this project, it is going to be presented at ICML2012 in a
couple of weeks:

[http://research.google.com/archive/unsupervised_icml2012.htm...](http://research.google.com/archive/unsupervised_icml2012.html)

they trained a huge neural network with millions of _unlabeled_ frames from
Youtube, and derived high-level features. The authors showed that the network
learned without supervision the concepts of human face, human body... and
_cat_.

~~~
abeppu
That work was impressive -- but kind of over the top. From what I can tell,
their dataset could at most have been like 2.5TB uncompressed. Their model
took 3 days to train on 1000 16 core machines. They called this "inexpensive
way to develop features from unlabeled data". Later they point out that their
model was "more than an order of magnitude larger than other large networks
reported in literature".

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renegadedev
"kittydar is best at detecting upright cats that are facing forward "

Good luck with getting a cat to do that

~~~
sashahart
No one wants to be the person who implements an elaborate system for
recognizing cat butts.

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Groxx
Fun idea, but definitely needs more training. It even gets things wrong on the
test images (sometimes spectacularly - why those leaves in particular?).

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mikeevans
Drag and drop in the demo doesn't seem to work for me (Win 7/Chrome 19).

Otherwise, awesome.

~~~
hinathan
Ditto for Mac/Safari. There must be something diabolical and/or useful to do
with this tech but I'm struggling to come up with a good use case other than
'because kitty'

~~~
showerst
Aside from the earlier mention of 'I want to just let my cat into the house to
the exclusion of others' I think it's interesting because if you're not in the
computer vision world, you don't see a ton of stories or demos about detecting
things other than human faces in pictures.

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runjake
I tried a few different photos of multiple cats. It'd always get 1 correct
positive, but never more than 1 correct positive. In every image's case, it
would have multiple false positives in a cat's fur patterns.

Here's one example:

[http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--RBVfn6FzOI/Tq5kOxFGKEI/AAAAAAAACn...](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--RBVfn6FzOI/Tq5kOxFGKEI/AAAAAAAACnM/LaiZLD0sUKY/s1600/cats.jpg)

Neat start, though. I have a particular interest in this subject as I'm
entertain schemes that allow our cats into our garage while locking
neighborhood cats out. I ran into similar issues with fur patterns during
image processing techniques. I'll probably end up relying on a more simple
solution: RFID tags attach to their collars.

~~~
JonWood
Your cat may already have an RFID tag - they're used in the process of
"chipping" cats so that they can be traced if they find themselves at a vet
without their owner. If there is one, it'll be on the back of their neck.

~~~
mmoche
These tags tend to migrate, particularly in older animals. Shelter workers are
trained to check the entire animal as the tags often end up on the animal's
side or stomach.

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BryanB55
I love how simple the photo uploader is. I'm currently working on a new upload
system for my site, does anyone know how compatible a drag and drop system
that automatically shows the image like that would be? Does it work in all
browsers? IE? It seems to work in all of my browsers but my target users are
not very computer savy and usually have IE7, 8 or old computers.

~~~
smarx
Not very. I believe drag/drop file upload doesn't work in IE at _all_. See
here for the browser support for a very nice file upload component:
[https://github.com/blueimp/jQuery-File-
Upload/wiki/Browser-s...](https://github.com/blueimp/jQuery-File-
Upload/wiki/Browser-support).

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joejohnson
The test image with four cats on a "Hello Kitty" rug results in only three
cats being detected. The white cat on the far right has it's eyes nearly
closed; maybe this is why it wasn't detected?

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Zimahl
The test images didn't work for me (Firefox 5.0, don't ask). However, saving
the test images to my desktop then dragging them in worked fine.

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alexleavitt
Oh no... :(

<http://i.imgur.com/FlPXf.png>

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stcredzero
I dragged a screenshot of their logo into Kittydar. No cats. Magritte would be
pleased.

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danso
For the curious, the author references this Microsoft paper, "Cat Head
Detection - How to Effectively Exploit Shape and Texture Features":
<http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/80582/ECCV_CAT_PROC.pdf>

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vail130
It's pretty good at detecting some dog faces too!

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Killswitch
I freaking love kitty cats!

