Bluemix Takes Selfies to the Next Level With Drones July 16, 2015 | Written by: Niklas Heidloff With the latest technology it’s getting easier and easier for people to take pictures, record videos and share them. While two decades ago only professional photographers could afford equipment to produce high quality digital media, today smartphones come with cameras which often produce amazing results. To allow people to take even more impressive pictures, selfie sticks and action cameras have become very popular. To take this one step further, personally I think drones will become more popular to take pictures and record videos from angles as you couldn’t do this before. There are already quite a few drones that specialize on exactly this use case. The application below shows an easy implementation of a Selfie Drone. While the sample below uses an older drone, you can easily imagine quality improvements with more modern drones, for example drones that have cameras facing to the bottom which can be controlled separately from the actual drone.

I tweeted the portrait on this picture which Alchemy identified The Bluemix Selfie Drone application is available as open source. The project contains an application to take selfies via a Parrot AR Drone 2.0. black ops 2 maxis drone upgradeVia navigation buttons in a web application, the drone can be steered and a series of pictures can be taken. parrot ar drone serial numberThe pictures are stored for later review. parrot ar drone montrealAdditionally faces on the pictures are recognized and portraits are cropped out which can be tweeted. The application has been implemented via IBM Bluemix and the Internet of Things service. The pictures are stored in a Cloudant NoSQL database. The Alchemy Face Recognition API is used to find the faces.

The web application has been built via Java and Bluemix’s Liberty for Java runtime. To run the application you also need to set up the Parrot drone controller which is a Node.js application running on your notebook. This application uses the node-ar-drone module, an implementation of the Parrot networking protocols, to communicate with the drone. To find out more about the app dev capabilities of the Parrat drones check out Parrot For Developers. To find out more about the controller check out the video by Ryan Baxter. Bluemix made the implementation of the application pretty easy. I used the IoT service because it manages the secure/reliable communications and provides a free tier up to 10 devices for testing. The service has the ability to create organizations, register devices and applications and ensure only applications that are registered to the organization can communicate to the device end points. I used the AlchemyVision Face API to identify faces on the pictures.

There is a simple REST API that you can also try online. The API also returns the gender and age of the recognized people which I didn’t use in this application. It even recognizes specific people from a corpus of 60,000 well known people. I chose the Cloudant NoSQL database because it’s really easy to store the pictures as attachments. It’s also easy to create a database and the design programmatically the first time the application code accesses the database. Plus for development purposes developers can use the database service for free as long as they use less than 20GB of data and less than 100,000 API calls per month. As runtime I picked Liberty for Java but I also could have used other runtimes like Node.js. I decided to use Java simply because personally I have most experience in Java and I didn’t see a compelling reason to use another technology. There is also a good sample how to use web sockets which I needed to display the pictures and there are also many other samples and tutorials I could leverage.

I did the frontend via AngularJS which invokes REST APIs implemented in the Java application. Share this post:Share on FacebookShare on LinkedInShare on Twitter Add Decision Automation to your node-RED flows in 20 minutes A Chatbot with Watson Speech-To-Text and Mobile Analytics IBM and Box – The foundation for the new business realities Migrate Analytics for Apache Spark Notebooks to the IBM Data Science Experience Announcing the DevOps Insights beta The Dat Project helps scientific researchers and other academics preserve and share large scientific datasets online and offline. We spoke to founder Max Ogden about the challenges of dealing with these large datasets—and with the scientists who create them. IBM Bluemix OpenWhisk is an event-driven compute platform that executes application logic in response to events or through direct invocations–from web/mobile apps or other endpoints. In line with the microservices trend, OpenWhisk has the significant benefit of supporting the decomposition of applications into as many small building blocks as needed.

Do you think robots like tennis? My guess is that when the Robot Apocalypse starts, you’ll see them playing all the time. So, for the human race to survive, it will be critical for us to learn as much as we can from the large amount of data generated at the Wimbledon tennis championships and collected by IBM. I encourage you to take part in the Wimbledon Innovation Challenge. You’ll have access to tennis data and use IBM Bluemix to build an app that consumes and analyzes this data in useful, innovative ways.We are pleased to announce this year's Automic Live - Copenhagen, and we'd love for you to join us for this complimentary event!  Automic Live is a global Business Automation event hosted by Automic Software. Industry experts, practitioners, product specialists, customers and guests will come together to discuss key trends in the industry, best practices in IT automation and how automation empowers IT to drive business value and agility. Please join us at the stunning NIMB Hotel for the first-ever Automic Live in Denmark.