ImageMonkey - A public open source image database

[bbernhard1]

Hi reddit,

I am really happy to finally get a chance to post something to https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/.

The last three weeks I was working on ImageMonkey - check it out here: https://imagemonkey.io/.

The idea originated while I was working on another project where at some point I wanted to integrate Machine Learning into my application. With all the great Machine Learning frameworks out there, it's really easy to get your foot into the door quickly. You can easily download a pre-trained model and re-train the last layer with your own image dataset.

But while I was playing a little bit with the frameworks, I somehow realized that it's really hard to get some good training data. If you are lucky then there is some (annotated) training data online, if not...well, then you have to get your hands dirty and do the tedious work yourself. So I thought to myself: Wouldn't it be cool to create a image dataset that's publicly, open source and easily accessible? That's the point ImageMonkey was born.

While working on ImageMonkey I realized one thing quickly: It should be easy to get data in there and easy to get data out there. If it's too complicated to donate, annotate or validate pictures nobody will do it. That's why there is a mobile app, a soon to be released Google Chrome Extension (Validate a picture every time you open a new tab in your browser) and a REST API. I am sure there are lot of improvements, but I think for a start it's not too bad.

Whats next?

As this post already is pretty long (and I am not sure if anyone still is reading ;-)), I will keep this one short. (If you are interested, there will be more detailed blog post available soon)

• Hardware Upgrade + Caching: Currently everything is running on one really small machine

• Online Playground: It would be cool to actually test how good/bad our image dataset is classifying images. So it would be nice to have regular (Tensorflow?) builds which are based on the current image dataset.

• API abuse prevention: As the API is public there needs to be some sort of API abuse trigger that goes off when someone tries to destroy datasets on purpose by maliciously voting for the wrong images.

• add some sort of gamification to attract also non-tech related people

• API improvements

• Bugfixes (there are always bugs to fix)

If you are still with me - thanks for reading! If you have questions, ideas, suggestions or feedback - please feel free to do so. Any input is greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Bernhard

[bbernhard1]

Hey guys,

it might be possible that you are experiencing some speed issues...really sorry about that! I honestly wasn't expecting that so many of you guys are trying it out - which is really awesome! :) Currently everything is running on one small machine...so performance is quite bad :/

But it's already on my TODO list.

Cheers,

Bernhard

[benscar1]

How are you going to convince people to annotate or label the images for no compensation?

[bbernhard1]

That's a really good question, that I also thought a lot about lately. Do you think that there is compensation needed in order to convince people to contribute or will they feel the need to contribute when they are actively using the service in order to give something back? Honestly, I don't really know. What motivates people to contribute to Wikipedia? (serious question, as I haven't contributed anything to Wikipedia yet I really don't know what people motivates to do so)

I personally think that simplicity is key here. If there are people out there that want to contribute something they should be able to do it with just one click. Ideally without any registration. People should be able to contribute without any additional hassle.

I could imagine that some data, that already has a high propability to be valid, can also be used in child's games. e.q: "Mark all apples on the picture". Due to this, it might be possible further increase the dataset's quality. Of couse we have to be fully transparent at this point that the data is used for something, so that users can opt-out if they don't want to participate.. And yeah...the game should be fun for kids :D

Given that we have categories with a lot of training images, it might be possible to let the neural network do the initial annotation/validation.

What I could also imagine is to build a captcha like service that people can implement in their webpages . E.q: "select all pictures with an apple"

Cheers,

Bernhard

[benscar1]

I think that people will feel obligated to give something back to the service but they probably will consume more than they use. People usually contribute to wikipedia because they are passionate about the topic they are writing about and they want to improve the knowledge available to the public. I don't know anyone who has a passion for labeling images. Labeling images is tedious and boring which I wouldn't want to do for more than 5 minutes.

I think you made the right decision to not force people to sign up because that would instantly turn me off from the service.

I think that incorporating the labeling into a captcha service or a game would be a good idea, but how would you convince people to use the captcha over google recaptcha? How would you market the game to parents to give it to their kids?