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Generally speaking, human beings can recognize objects without too much effort or consideration. However, recognizing objects in images can be a very difficult task in the field of computer vision.

There are many use cases in which this difficulty becomes evident. One specific use case involves license plate detection—it’s particularly a big challenge because of the differences inherent in the plates (i.e. the objects) themselves: different sizes and styles, the conditions and lighting under which the images of the plates are captured, etc.

Continue reading “License Plate Recognition, Detection, and Plate Number Extraction on iOS”

As a first small step towards a federated learning platform that supports mobile and wearable devices (in particular, devices within the Apple ecosystem) I’ve being developing a Swift library called SwiftCoreMLTools that mimics in Swift a subset of the functionalities of Apple’s CoreMLTools Python library.

Continue reading “Core ML On-Device Training, with Transfer Learning from Swift for TensorFlow Models”

Apple is truly investing in testing tools and technologies, which is a great thing for app developers. In fact, Apple announced parallel testing support for the XCTest framework at WWDC 2018 in its platform state of the union session. There was a separate session on What’s New in Testing, describing new features in Code Coverage, XCTest, and XCUITests, which included parallel testing.

Continue reading “The Fast, Furious, and Flaky: Continuous Integration with Xcode 10 Parallel Tests”

If you at all follow the economics of mobile platforms, then you’ve almost inevitably heard about (and likely saw) Epic’s recent viral campaign in response to Apple’s decision to ban the incredibly popular, free-to-play game Fortnite from the App Store.

You can read much more about what’s happening between Epic and Apple, but it boils down to this: The App Store has banned Fortnite for violations of its terms of service, specifically because Epic has been using its own in-game payment system. This makes some sense, given Fortnite’s status as an elite freemium gaming experience.

Continue reading “Monetizing Mobile Machine Learning”

In a previous article, I described how to utilize speech recognition in Android. This consisted of capturing user speech, processing it, and implementing it.

But what if that process is reversed, and you want to take a text input and output speech? This type of system is, so-called, text-to-speech (TTS). TTS software, in general, creates a computer-generated voice that’s also considered as an assistive technology tool.

Continue reading Make your Android apps talk with Text-To-Speech

While flashy deep learning research grabs headlines, what happens to models after they are trained is equally important. To build a great product, you need to plan for the entire lifecycle of machine learning models, from data collection and training to deployment and monitoring.

This becomes even more critical when deploying ML models outside of the cloud, directly in mobile apps where you face the unique challenges of supporting multiple platforms, hundreds of chipsets, and billions of installs.

Continue reading “The Lifecycle of Mobile Machine Learning Models”

Machine learning, deep learning, neural networks, artificial intelligence. You can’t work a day in tech without coming across one of these buzzwords.

For a developer just looking to get started, it’s hard to wade through the jargon and ever-changing tools. This post is the first in a broader series we’re working on at Heartbeat on to help people get up to speed or stay current.

Continue reading “Mobile Machine Learning 101: Glossary”

For developers, the ability to run pre-trained models on mobile signifies an important shift towards edge computing. By being able to perform data processing straight from the user’s phone, private data remains in their hands, apps run more smoothly without having to wait for cellular networks, and your company’s cloud bill is significantly reduced.

Fast, responsive apps can now run complex machine learning models. This technological shift will usher in a new wave of app development by empowering product owners and engineers to think outside the box.

Continue reading “Intro to Machine Learning on Android — How to convert a custom model to TensorFlow Lite”