
On Building an Instagram Street Art Dataset and Detection Model - rememberlenny
https://blog.floydhub.com/instagram-street-art/
======
robbiemitchell
Analyzing street art seems like something that will surprise artists when
police figure out they can retroactively identify all the places someone
vandalized (if they're ever caught once and tied to a particular style). I
wonder whether artists will figure out how to confuse or otherwise prevent
these kinds of automatic identification?

~~~
rememberlenny
This is a great question that I definitely don't know the answer to yet.

There is a trope around graffiti artists that their biggest fans are the
police. Often an artist will spend all night painting a mural, and then by the
morning its already gone, but the paint "buffers" submit a photo to the
police.

I definitely think there will be a cat-and-mouse synonymous with the
adversarial neural networks examples for hiding weapons in everyday objects.

At the end of the day, most street art is commissioned or done in pre-approved
areas, so I don't think it will be a cause of concern with larger artists.

~~~
thatcat
That would be a neat foia project - request graffiti datasets.

~~~
rememberlenny
Never thought of that, but this is brilliant.

------
rememberlenny
Hey all! I'm Lenny and the author of this post.

For anyone interested in street art and machine learning, please check out my
email newsletter around these topics.

Link: [https://www.publicart.io/](https://www.publicart.io/)

------
evrydayhustling
Speaking of Google Image search, Google actually did a pretty nice arts and
culture project on this a while ago:
[https://artsandculture.google.com/project/street-
art](https://artsandculture.google.com/project/street-art)

I wonder if you could use their provided StreetView to generate a bunch of
perspective views for the same artwork... or if computing a view from another
angle could be a way to fuzz your existing training set to generate more
examples.

~~~
rememberlenny
You are one step ahead of me.

I want to try and map out street art in cities by using the landmark points in
the background of images. Theres a few neat datasets that do landmark ->
geodata translation, but as expected, its limited.

That being said, I can imagine in a very near future, it will be possible to
train against google maps and get enough "landmarks" to geolocalize images.

------
charliecurran
God damnit Hacker News...as someone who recognizes the artwork in the header
image because the artist is a good friend and was at my wedding several months
back...

This is straight up surveillance that will cannibalize what it's observing.

They're quite creative, they're gonna dazzle your machine vision. Why build
tools to hinder/distort/build paranoia into something you're interested in if
you genuinely are?

------
minimaxir
Isn't that Instagram scraper
([https://instaloader.github.io/](https://instaloader.github.io/)) against
their Terms of Use? Insta _really_ locked down their API so I assume they
won't look too kindly on this. (although it doesn't require login so they
can't really punish accounts)

~~~
noddy1
Zuckerberg is very happy to bend/break the rules and abuse his customers when
it suits him, so screw him. These aren't instagram's images anyway - they're
the images of the people who painted them, and the people who photographed
them.

------
gcbw2
It opens with the most silly value proposition anyone could think of! "What if
you could pump all of the Instagram photos of Banksy's artwork into a program
that could pinpoint where the next one's likely to be?"

Then it is a simple image classifier with one dimension (graffit, not
graffit).

------
dsnuh
Hi, really neat project. I don't have much to add, other than it would be neat
to see this for Buenos Aires street art. When I visited (granted this was
about 10 years ago) I remember the amount of stencil graffiti was striking.

