Introduction

In my previous blog post I used the Microsoft Translator API in my BonAppetit Shiny app to recommend restaurants to tourists. I’m getting a little bit addicted to the Microsoft API’s, they can be fun to use 🙂. In this blog post I will briefly describe some of the Project Oxford API’s of Microsoft.

The API’s can be called from within R, and if you combine them with other API’s, for example Twitter, then interesting “Twitter face” analyses can be done.  See my “TweetFace” shiny app to analyse faces that can be found on Twitter.

Project Oxford

The API’s of Project Oxford can be categorized into:

• Computer Vision,
• Face,
• Video,
• Speech and
• Language.

The free tier subscription provides 5000 API calls per month (with a rate limit of 20 calls per minute). I focused my experiments on the computer vision and face API’s, a lot of functionality is available to analyze images. For example, categorization of images, adult content detection, OCR, face recognition, gender analysis, age estimation and emotion detection.

Calling the API’s from R

The httr package provides very convenient functions to call the Microsoft API’s. You need to sign-up first and obtain a key. Let’s do a simple test on Angelina Jolie by using the face detect API.

Angelina Jolie, picture link

library(httr)

faceURL = "https://api.projectoxford.ai/face/v1.0/detect?returnFaceId=true&returnFaceLandmarks=true&returnFaceAttributes=age,gender,smile,facialHair"
img.url = 'http://www.buro247.com/images/Angelina-Jolie-2.jpg'

faceKEY = '123456789101112131415'

mybody = list(url = img.url)

faceResponse = POST(
  url = faceURL, 
  content_type('application/json'), add_headers(.headers = c('Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key' = faceKEY)),
  body = mybody,
  encode = 'json'
)
faceResponse
Response [https://api.projectoxford.ai/face/v1.0/detect?returnFaceId=true&returnFaceLandmarks=true&returnFaceAttributes=age,gender,smile,facialHair]
Date: 2015-12-16 10:13
Status: 200
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Size: 1.27 kB

If the call was successful a “Status: 200” is returned and the response object is filled with interesting information. The API returns the information as JSON which is parsed by R into nested lists.

AngelinaFace = content(faceResponse)[[1]]
names(AngelinaFace)
[1] "faceId"  "faceRectangle" "faceLandmarks" "faceAttributes"

AngelinaFace$faceAttributes
$gender
[1] "female"

$age
[1] 32.6

$facialHair
$facialHair$moustache
[1] 0

$facialHair$beard
[1] 0

$facialHair$sideburns
[1] 0

Well, the API recognized the gender and that there is no facial hair 🙂, but her age is under estimated, Angelina is 40 not 32.6! Let’s look at emotions, the emotion API has its own key and url.

URL.emoface = 'https://api.projectoxford.ai/emotion/v1.0/recognize'

emotionKey = 'ABCDEF123456789101112131415'

mybody = list(url = img.url)

faceEMO = POST(
  url = URL.emoface,
  content_type('application/json'), add_headers(.headers = c('Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key' = emotionKEY)),
  body = mybody,
  encode = 'json'
)
faceEMO
AngelinaEmotions = content(faceEMO)[[1]]
AngelinaEmotions$scores
$anger
[1] 4.573111e-05

$contempt
[1] 0.001244121

$disgust
[1] 0.0001096572

$fear
[1] 1.256477e-06

$happiness
[1] 0.0004313129

$neutral
[1] 0.9977798

$sadness
[1] 0.0003823086

$surprise
[1] 5.75276e-06

A fairly neutral face. Let’s test some other Angelina faces

Find similar faces

A nice piece of functionality of the API is finding similar faces. First a list of faces needs to be created, then with a ‘query face’ you can search for similar-looking faces in the list of faces. Let’s look at the most sexy actresses.

## Scrape the image URLs of the actresses
library(rvest)

linksactresses = 'http://www.imdb.com/list/ls050128191/'

out = read_html(linksactresses)
images = html_nodes(out, '.zero-z-index')
imglinks = html_nodes(out, xpath = "//img[@class='zero-z-index']/@src") %>% html_text()

## additional information, the name of the actress
imgalts = html_nodes(out, xpath = "//img[@class='zero-z-index']/@alt") %>% html_text()

Create an empty list, by calling the facelist API, you should spcify a facelistID, which is placed as request parameter behind the facelist URL. So my facelistID is “listofsexyactresses” as shown in the code below.

### create an id and name for the face list
URL.face = "https://api.projectoxford.ai/face/v1.0/facelists/listofsexyactresses"

mybody = list(name = 'top 100 of sexy actresses')

faceLIST = PUT(
  url = URL.face,
  content_type('application/json'), add_headers(.headers = c('Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key' = faceKEY)),
  body = mybody,
  encode = 'json'
)
faceLIST
Response [https://api.projectoxford.ai/face/v1.0/facelists/listofsexyactresses]
Date: 2015-12-17 15:10
Status: 200
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Size: 108 B

Now fill the list with images, the API allows you to provide user data with each image, this can be handy to insert names or other info. So for one image this works as follows

i=1
userdata = imgalts[i]
linkie = imglinks[i]
face.uri = paste(
  'https://api.projectoxford.ai/face/v1.0/facelists/listofsexyactresses/persistedFaces?userData=',
  userdata,
  sep = ";"
)
face.uri = URLencode(face.uri)
mybody = list(url = linkie )

faceLISTadd = POST(
  url = face.uri,
  content_type('application/json'), add_headers(.headers = c('Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key' = faceKEY)),
  body = mybody,
  encode = 'json'
)
faceLISTadd
print(content(faceLISTadd))
Response [https://api.projectoxford.ai/face/v1.0/facelists/listofsexyactresses/persistedFaces?userData=Image%20of%20Naomi%20Watts]
Date: 2015-12-17 15:58
Status: 200
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Size: 58 B

$persistedFaceId
[1] '32fa4d1c-da68-45fd-9818-19a10beea1c2'

## status 200 is OK

Just loop over the 100 faces to complete the face list. With the list of images we can now perform a query with a new ‘query face’. Two steps are needed, first call the face detect API to obtain a face ID. I am going to use the image of Angelina, but a different one than the image on IMDB.

faceDetectURL = 'https://api.projectoxford.ai/face/v1.0/detect?returnFaceId=true&returnFaceLandmarks=true&returnFaceAttributes=age,gender,smile,facialHair'
img.url = 'http://a.dilcdn.com/bl/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2009/06/angelinaangry002.jpg'

mybody = list(url = img.url)

faceRESO = POST(
  url = faceDetectURL,
  content_type('application/json'), add_headers(.headers =  c('Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key' = faceKEY)),
  body = mybody,
  encode = 'json'
)
faceRESO
fID = content(faceRESO)[[1]]$faceId

With the face ID, query the face list with the “find similar” API. There is a confidence of almost 60%.

sim.URI = 'https://api.projectoxford.ai/face/v1.0/findsimilars'

mybody = list(faceID = fID, faceListID = 'listofsexyactresses' )

faceSIM = POST(
  url = sim.URI,
  content_type('application/json'), add_headers(.headers = c('Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key' = faceKEY)),
  body = mybody,
  encode = 'json'
)
faceSIM
yy = content(faceSIM)
yy
[[1]]
[[1]]$persistedFaceId
[1] "6b4ff942-b216-4817-9739-3653a467a594"

[[1]]$confidence
[1] 0.5980769

The picture below shows some other matches…..

Conclusion

The API’s of Microsoft’s Project Oxford provide nice functionality for computer vision, face analysis. It’s fun to use them, see my ‘TweetFace’ Shiny app to analyse images on Twitter.

Cheers,

Longhow