Hands-on Tutorials

Neural-network-based object detection is a powerful technique that’s getting easier and easier to take advantage of. With Google’s Cloud AutoML computer vision service (as well as similar services like Microsoft’s Custom Vision), it’s now simple and cheap to train a powerful object detection model and deploy it as a client-side React app. And best of all, you don’t need to hire a data scientist to do it — the model training is code-free, so any application developer can train a model and focus on doing what they do best, which is building useful and fun applications!

Given the current state of the world with COVID-19, I thought it would be an interesting test case to try building a mask detector — something that could take a video stream, and report back on the locations of people in a frame who are wearing masks, and of those who aren’t. This could potentially be pretty useful to deploy in businesses trying to enforce mask mandates, and ride sharing services are already using something similar to check that drivers and riders are wearing masks. …