Auto Alt Text Lamdba API

This repository contains the code for the API backing the Auto Alt Text chrome extension.

Working API Link + Usage

This API link is working as of Aug 5 2017.

https://v0fkjw6l82.execute-api.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/prod/auto-alt-text-api?url=url1,url2...

Usage

The URL accepts a single query parameter url with the link to the image you wish to analyze.

Example:

Request:

https://v0fkjw6l82.execute-api.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/prod/auto-alt-text-api?url=https://hack4impact.org/assets/images/photos/mayors-awards.jpg

Response:

[
  {
    "captions": [
      {
        "prob": "0.005958", 
        "sentence": "a group of people standing next to each other ."
      }, 
      {
        "prob": "0.002934", 
        "sentence": "a group of people posing for a picture ."
      }, 
      {
        "prob": "0.002054", 
        "sentence": "a group of people posing for a picture"
      }
    ], 
    "url": "https://hack4impact.org/assets/images/photos/mayors-awards.jpg"
  }
]

Working in the chrome extension

Purpose

The purpose of the Auto Alt Text API is to generate captions for scenes with the im2txt model. Additionally, this API can generate captions in < 5 seconds on a Lambda instance.

Get it running

Create a docker instance and clone files from this repository into that instance. Note that all these files are using Python2.7 as the standard python version.

The entry file for this project is application.py. All necessary modules have been provided except for boto3 which is part of the standard AWS Lambda runtime. This can be installed via pip

pip install boto3

Log into your AWS account and create an S3 bucket named auto-alt-lamdba (you can alter the name of your s3 bucket as long as you change line 73 in application.py.

Next, download the zip file containing the pared down trained im2txt model from Google Drive

Lastly, you will need to create an AWS Lambda instance with the following characteristics

Runtime = Python 2.7
Handler = application.predict
Role = (see next section)

Advanced Settings
Memory (MB) = 1344 MB
Timeout = 1 min

Note: To keep the tensorflow model loaded into memory, it would be beest o create a cloudwatch event to ping the model every 5 minutes or so.

Creating an IAM policy role

In order to have the Lambda app pull the model.zip file from S3, it is necessary to give permissions for S3 to access the bucket. Additionally, to keep the application "warm" the role will need access to CloudWatch logs. Lastly, it will need limited Lambda Write functionality. The following is my policy summary as of Aug 5 2017.

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "IAmNotSureIfThisIsUniqueButIAmHidingIt",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "s3:*"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:s3:::auto-alt-lambda",
                "arn:aws:s3:::auto-alt-lambda/*"
            ]
        },
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "logs:*"
            ],
            "Resource": "arn:aws:logs:*:*:*"
        },
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "lambda:InvokeFunction"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "*"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Known Errors / Room for Improvement

For working with non standard images that can't be handled by tensorflow's image.decode, the application will fail (the original model was trained on JPEG images). Importing a library such as Pillow can work...but Lamdba has a maximum file size limit of 512 MB of unzipped files in memory (currently I am close to 490 MB of usage).

A better model that is trained on a more comprehensive image set other than MSCOCO can also be of use.

Larger picture things would include creating separate APIs for face detection (along with emotion detection) as well as text recognition.