Amazon’s AWS division today expanded its line-up of pre-trained machine learning tools with the launch of Amazon Rekognition Video. This new service works for both batch uploads and even real-time video streams, which gives Amazon a leg up on similar services from some of its competitors.
With Rekognition, AWS already offered a tool for analyzing static images and getting data about them out of those image files. With this video version, developers can now automatically get information about the objects in a video, the scenes they are set in and the activities that are happening in them. The service also includes support for person detection and recognition (and it’s pre-trained to recognize celebrities). It also can track people through a video and filter out potentially inappropriate content.
Recognizing objects and people in videos is quite a bit harder than doing the same thing in images. Over the course of the last year or so, we’ve seen Google and others focus on video recognition, though, and that work is now paying off in the form of services like Rekognition, which can automatically generate metadata from video files.