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What is Amazon Rekognition?

Joseph NelsonPublished Aug 30, 2021
1 min read
SUMMARY

Amazon Rekognition is an off-the-shelf computer vision API that detects and classifies a fixed set of common objects (furniture, plants, and similar generic categories) from images sent via HTTP. It works well for those predefined categories, but if your application needs to detect domain-specific objects not in its catalog, you need a custom model. Roboflow covers that gap by letting you bring your own labeled dataset, train a custom detection or classification model, and expose it as an API you can call directly from your application.

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What is Amazon Rekognition (in 60 Seconds or Fewer)?

Amazon's Rekognition is Amazon's off-the-shelf computer vision API for understanding the contents of images. It's basically a model that has some standard, known common objects that you might expect to find given images – maybe chairs, plants, or pieces of furniture and things like this. You can use that API in your app send up an image, and get back a detection for classification for some of these generic known items.

What if I Want to See Objects that are Now in Amazon Rekognition's API?

Then you need to build a custom model for those specific objects of interest. That's the tools that we work on Roboflow, so you can easily bring your own data set, do a little bit of labeling, train up, and have an API set up that you can use directly in your app for classification and object detection – even setting a confidence level of those objects of interest. You can then continuously improve your model over time as well.

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