Last updated: Dec-15-2024
Cloudinary is a cloud-based service that provides an end-to-end image and video management solution including uploads, storage, transformations, optimizations and delivery. Cloudinary offers a very rich set of image transformation and analysis capabilities and allows you to extract the semantic data from uploaded images: photo metadata (Exif & IPTC) including location and camera details, coordinates of automatically detected faces, color histogram and predominant colors. In addition, Cloudinary allows you to assign multiple tags to images for listing and managing your media assets.
Amazon Rekognition is a service that makes it easy to add image analysis to your applications. Cloudinary provides an add-on for Amazon Rekognition's automatic celebrity tagging and face detection capabilities, fully integrated into Cloudinary's image management and transformation pipeline. When using the Amazon Rekognition Celebrity Detection add-on, your images are automatically tagged according to the celebrities detected in each image.
Amazon Rekognition can recognize thousands of celebrities in a wide range of categories, such as entertainment and media, sports, business, and politics, a process that would take huge amounts of time and resources if performed manually. Amazon Rekognition's deep learning-based image recognition allows you to search, verify and organize all your images, with outstanding performance in terms of the time needed to process large photo volumes with a very high precision rate.
Getting started
Before you can use the Amazon Rekognition Celebrity Detection add-on:
You must have a Cloudinary account. If you don't already have one, you can sign up for a free account.
Register for the add-on: make sure you're logged in to your account and then go to the Add-ons page. For more information about add-on registrations, see Registering for add-ons.
Keep in mind that many of the examples on this page use our SDKs. For SDK installation and configuration details, see the relevant SDK guide.
If you're new to Cloudinary, you may want to take a look at the Developer Kickstart for a hands-on, step-by-step introduction to Programmable Media features.
Celebrity recognition and categorization
Take a look at the following photo of The Rolling Stones:
By setting the detection
parameter to aws_rek_face
when calling Cloudinary's upload or update methods, Amazon Rekognition is used to automatically detect celebrity faces in the uploaded or specified existing image. For example:
- Images must have a minimum height and width of 80 pixels.
- You can use upload presets to centrally define a set of upload options including add-on operations to apply, instead of specifying them in each upload call. You can define multiple upload presets, and apply different presets in different upload scenarios. You can create new upload presets in the Upload Presets page of the Console Settings or using the upload_presets Admin API method. Note, if using automatic tagging, you need to create the upload preset programmatically. From the Upload page of the Console Settings, you can also select default upload presets to use for image, video, and raw API uploads (respectively) as well as default presets for image, video, and raw uploads performed via the Media Library UI.
Learn more: Upload presets
The upload API response includes the celebrities identified by the Amazon Rekognition Celebrity Detection add-on. As can be seen in the response snippet below, all four of the celebrities were automatically detected in the uploaded photo. The match_confidence
score is a percentage value that represents the confidence level of the detected celebrity, where 100 means 100% confidence.
The response also includes information about unrecognized faces detected in the image if relevant. Additionally, the results provide detailed data on the face's location, pose, orientation within the image, and facial landmarks.
Automatically adding tags to images
Automatically categorizing your images is a useful way to organize your Cloudinary media assets. By providing the auto_tagging
parameter to an upload
call alongside the aws_rek_face
value for the detection
parameter, images are automatically assigned resource tags based on the Amazon Rekognition detected celebrities. The value of the auto_tagging
parameter is the minimum confidence score of a detected celebrity that should be used for the automatically assigned resource tag. The value of the auto_tagging
parameter is given as a decimal value between 0 and 1.0, where 1.0 represents 100%. Assigning these resource tags allows you to list and search images in your Media Explorer using Cloudinary's API and Web interface.
The following code example automatically tags an uploaded image with all detected celebrities that have a match_confidence
score of at least 70% (auto_tagging = 0.7).
The response of the upload API call above returns the detected categories as well as the assigned tags. In this case, all the faces in the image were recognized with a high enough score to be used as tags.
You can also use the update
method of the Admin API to apply Amazon Rekognition to already uploaded images, based on their public IDs, and then automatically tag them according to the detected celebrities.
For example, the following image was uploaded to Cloudinary with the golfer
public ID.
The following code sample uses Cloudinary's update
method to apply Amazon Rekognition's celebrity detection to the golfer
uploaded image, and then automatically assign resource tags based on the celebrities detected with at least a 90% confidence level.
The response of the update
API call includes the detected celebrities, and automatically assigned tags. As you can see in the response snippet below, 'Tiger Woods' was recognized in the image with a match_confidence
score of over 90%, which led to his name being auto-assigned as a tag.
You can use the Admin API's resource
method to return the details of a resource, including the celebrities that you already extracted using the upload
or update
methods.