You would never have suspected your webcam could do that

It is likely that you currently consider your webcam as this pretty useless thing that’s only good for video calls ( if you haven't simply covered it ).

Well, let me tell you that it may greatly change in the upcoming years.

AI is coming !

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Indeed with the rise of image classification made possible by machine learning and the constant improvement of their video quality, webcams are about to live their most important revolution since video chats.

Webcams from all over the world will soon be able to analyse what they record and so make a bridge between the computer and its environment.
Webcam will become the man of the future’s third eye.

Here is an example of an in-browser implementation of real time object detection YOLO

Image Credit : https://github.com/ModelDepot/tfjs-yolo-tiny#demo

What about our privacy ?

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If the idea that websites and applications would be interested by your webcam seems scarier than exciting to you, we agree.

However they might be a miracle solution to stay in control of your webcam footage and still benefit from AI.

Not long ago, Google released TensorFlow JS, a javascript library for machine learning that runs locally in your browser.

What that basically means is that your data, like webcam recordings, can be processed directly on your computer and never have to be transferred through the internet.

My view

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This is the strategy I implemented on my in-browser app SlouchyJS to detect the user’s posture without downloading its webcam’s photos to my website.
If you want to learn more about the code to use the webcam

Besides being respectful of private life, decentralized machine learning algorithm have other interesting characteristics I’ll discuss in other posts.
So you should follow me not to miss these information.

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Made with fun by Hugo Rosenkranz.