alwaysAI’s APIs Are the Key to Our Best-in-Class Computer Vision Platform

Every Friday at alwaysAI is Demo Day. Our team gets to show off what they’ve been working on, collaborate, and engage with our product. 

At a recent Demo Day, one of our engineers was showing us the progress she’d made on a new use case for a client. She said she was able to make progress quickly because she was able to use an API in our edgeIQ library. “We have so many APIs I think we sometimes forget how many could be repurposed.” The other engineers nodded and laughed. 

Our robust catalog of APIs is one of the features of our platform that makes us most proud. Without APIs, creating effective models and applications is like trying to walk across the country. It’s possible but…why? 

alwaysAI’s APIs are a true differentiator of our platform. They are continuously being refined and expanded by our expert team of engineers who use them daily to make computer vision easier.  

Though APIs are only one piece of the computer vision puzzle, they are critical to unlocking the practical data that enterprises need to streamline operations. In simple terms, APIs make applications functional however, they’re often undervalued. 

Many no-code and low-code computer vision platforms provide limited capabilities in favor of simplicity. Unfortunately, this often doesn’t solve the business problem at hand. What makes alwaysAI so unique is that we’ve kept all the critical functionality and added an incredible amount of flexibility accessible to anyone with basic coding and technical skills. 

How do we do it? Read below to learn more about what APIs are, how they help to power computer vision applications, and what sets alwaysAI’s APIs apart from the competition. 

What are APIs?

You can think of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) as cheat codes that provide data and functionality to an application. APIs push and pull information and facilitate the flow of data between different machine learning applications, ultimately enabling them to function successfully. For example, imagine you have a robot friend who loves to draw pictures. You want a rainbow drawing, but you don't know how to make it yourself. Instead, you give specific instructions to your robot friend, like "draw a big red arc, then an orange one, and keep going with all the colors of the rainbow."

In this example, you are like a computer program, and your robot friend is like a computer system. The set of instructions you gave to your robot friend is like an API. The API is a way for different programs or systems to talk to each other and work together. 

In a real-world context, APIs allow you to stream your favorite show whether you’re on a Windows PC, an iPad, or a TV. The application and API together ensure the data is compatible with your device.  In these examples, the API is like a language that allows different computer programs to communicate and share information. 

APIs allow developers to access specific features or data from a service or platform without having to understand the underlying code. For example, you could use an API to add blurring to a person detection application. This type of API is a pre-packed snippet of code users can plug into their application. In this way, APIs bridge the gap between complex algorithms and real-world machine learning applications. 

Computer Vision Provides Real-Time Visual Insights into Operations

To understand the relationship between computer vision and APIs, it’s important to clarify what computer vision is and how it works. 

Computer vision is a multidisciplinary field that enables computers to interpret and understand visual information from the world, much like humans do. It involves the development of algorithms and systems that allow machines to analyze and make decisions based on visual data, such as images or videos.

The primary goal of computer vision is to enable machines to gain a high-level understanding of visual content, including object recognition, scene understanding, and image interpretation. This field combines principles from computer science, mathematics, physics, and neuroscience to design systems that can extract meaningful information from visual data.

alwaysAI computer vision solutions allow businesses to detect people, objects, and events in real-time by leveraging existing cameras alongside edge devices or the cloud. Our comprehensive end-to-end platform streamlines the complex process making Vision AI accessible to enterprises looking for object recognition, image classification, and facial recognition solutions.

The implications of this unprecedented technology are far-reaching. Computer vision applications span a broad spectrum of industries. Any business with repeatable processes can benefit from computer vision. Quick service and fast casual restaurants use the real-time visual insights provided by computer vision to improve speed-of-service. In retail, computer vision personalizes customer experiences and streamlines operations with cashier-less stores. In manufacturing, it optimizes quality control and automates various processes.

The Crucial Role of APIs in Computer Vision

APIs serve as the linchpin between the complexities of computer vision algorithms and the strategic goals of enterprises.

APIs are indispensable in delivering successful computer vision solutions for several reasons. 

1. Accessibility and Efficiency: APIs democratize functionality by providing access to developers and enterprises. They offer entry points to integrate complex computer vision techniques into applications efficiently without intimate knowledge of technical code.

2. Cost-effective Scalability: Building a robust computer vision system from scratch can be a resource-intensive endeavor. APIs simplify complex and lengthy coding with pre-built modules and services, saving time and costs. Moreover, they scale effortlessly as your needs grow, eliminating the need for extensive infrastructure reconfiguration.

3. Enhanced Accuracy: Computer vision models continuously evolve. As providers update their models, APIs ensure users benefit from the latest advancements with the least amount of friction.

4. Cross-Platform Compatibility: APIs are designed for use across various platforms, ensuring seamless integration into web, mobile, and desktop applications. This cross-compatibility is vital for businesses reaching customers across multiple devices.

Why alwaysAI’s edgeIQ Library of APIs is Truly Remarkable

alwaysAI is incredibly proud to stand alongside OpenCV, Meta, and DeepStream as a truly comprehensive platform with a complete set of APIs to take your computer vision project from model creation to deployment to continuous application management.  As a truly end-to-end MLOps computer vision platform, alwaysAI has all the tools you need at every step of the process from data collection through application deployment. Our talented team of world-class engineers has built state-of-the-art features like model training and evaluation and remote deployment. But it is our unbeatable library of APIs that defines us as a computer vision leader. 

alwaysAI’s APIs seamlessly connect the technical intricacies of computer vision with the strategic advantages (i.e. unprecedented real-time visual data) that enterprises can leverage. 

alwaysAI has advanced sets of APIs for every aspect of your computer vision project including:

• Model APIs 
• Development APIs
• Hardware-based APIs: Engines and Accelerators
• Remote Deployment and Control APIs 
• Analytics APIs

The result? Our platform is easy to use with dramatically simpler code at every level. Customizing models and applications requires minimal changes on one standard interface guaranteeing they will work the same way no matter what changes you make. For example, with alwaysAI, you can change the model name, tracker, or incoming video stream with a quick and simple name change and not lose any functionality.

Computer vision is complex. The fewer changes you have to make to optimize performance the better. It’s nearly impossible to break anything using alwaysAI! 

alwaysAI’s APIs in Detail

Model APIs

There are numerous points of interaction with models – from training to adding a model to your application, updating the engine or accelerator, and running inference on a wide variety of systems. Our collection of integrated tools, including our command line interface (CLI) and our development API edgeIQ (see below), provides an easy and standardized way for developers to perform all these tasks without worrying about underlying architectures and complexities.

Development APIs

Our robust Python API library, edgeIQ, allows you to create sophisticated computer vision applications by reducing complex layers of code to easy-to-use commands – all from one convenient source. 

edgeIQ comprises collections of APIs for each level of application development:

• Retrieving images from incoming video stream sources
• Inferencing
• Filtering results
• Tracking objects
• Visualizing data

At each step of development, you can swap out different subclasses without changing multiple lines of code. For instance, you may start prototyping using video files but want to eventually read from live IP video streams. With edgeIQ, this can be done by changing a single class name – since the API is the same for both FileVideoStream and IPVideoStream.

Regardless of model architecture, calls to perform inference remain the same, as does model output. You can also filter by certain labels or confidence level, markup images with predictions, change the markup color, add text, visualize your application output, and much more using the same standard library. 

As edgeIQ is the foundation of your computer vision application, APIs in this library also have an impact on hardware selection and analytics, which are described in the following sections.

Engines and Accelerators

One of the biggest advantages edgeIQ offers to developers is that it enables them to tailor the computer vision models in applications independent of hardware choices and develop prototypes rapidly. 

Computer vision is a processor-heavy endeavor. While compute power is continually progressing, real-time inferencing still needs the parallel processing of a GPU or a specially designed accelerator. Each target environment will have different requirements and formats to optimally run a computer vision application, and it takes serious time and knowledge to get the most out of your hardware or explore new equipment. 

alwaysAI is the best in the business when it comes to hardware, especially edge devices. Our APIs allow you to run on the latest NVIDIA boards, target Qualcomm’s Cloud AI 100, and more. This includes optimized inferencing, model conversion, and deployment. Thanks to our hardware APIs, you can switch from a laptop to a GPU-equipped edge device quickly and easily, making our platform hardware-agnostic. 

Remote Deployment and Control

A robust computer vision model and application are only the beginning of your computer vision solution journey. You still need to deploy to your target device/environment, monitor performance, and make periodic updates. alwaysAI has a multitude of cloud-based APIs that allow you to deploy your application to one or many devices from any location, receive status and performance updates on a web-based dashboard, and even control your deployed applications remotely.

Analytics

Once you’ve built your computer vision application, you need a way to turn your visual data into actionable insights.  The Analytics APIs enable your application to send all relevant data to a queryable endpoint for downstream business intelligence tools to consume. Without an Analytics API, data derived from your camera streams are meaningless. By using the analytics API in edgeIQ, you can publish data to the cloud, and then query your own set of data using a personal secure API key to make better business decisions.

Conclusion

Computer vision is a game-changer. Empowering machines to interpret visual information is applicable to any industry needing real-time data about the physical environment. Computer vision is a complex field with several important steps required to deploy a successful application. 

alwaysAI’s APIs serve as the seamless bridge uniting the intricate technical aspects of computer vision with the strategic objectives of enterprises. Our APIs help businesses leverage the power of visual data to fuel innovation, efficiency, and sustainable growth. Whether you're a technical enthusiast or a results-oriented CIO, alwaysAI’s APIs are engineered to provide practical AI solutions that will transform your business. 

This article was co-authored by Lila Mullany and edited by Michael Dalman.