Category: Tech
Inspiration
In a world where we live surrounded by cameras, it often comes as a shock that the only person with no pictures of you is… you. Long drawn out are the goodbyes where you nervously ask a group of people you barely know if they could invite you to the PhotoCircle, much worse if they could add you to some elusive group chat. We love to playfully photobomb complete strangers for nothing to show for it… But what if we had something to show for it?
What it does
Today's photo sharing apps are built all on the same idea - A user has some photos, and they decide to share them with a person who they have a pre-made mode of contact with. Sounds good, you can treat photos just like documents. Or like papers. From your day job.
PSYCH! Photos are special! They're how we look back on times long gone, how we find inspiration, and they're a substantial part of the social system we live in.
What PhotoBomb seeks to do is connect you with the photos-long-lost. The photos of some of the memories you need to hang on to most. To give you back control of your likeness.
PhotoBomb is a photo library for both your photos, and anyone's photos of you. By using a machine learning model to encode human faces into 128-dimensional embeddings, similarity comparisons (incl. density-based clustering) can be run on them to find people.
By simply signing up with a selfie, you'll find any photos with you as the subject
How we built it
With sweat and tears! Running out of time for this so we unfortunately can't go further into it, but using Expo Go for front-end/mobile interface, Python/sci-kit/FastAPI for backend, and FireBase and FireStore for database, we were in over our heads, haha!
Challenges we ran into
Running our own model, managing our own database security, and learning the ropes of Expo Go, a React-Native framework new to all of us, we ran into our fair share of challenges. Despite feeling ahead of the curve at most checkpoints, we still cut it very close and had to unfortunately scrap some features, like decentralized, privacy-first storage.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We got it done! We are super proud of our project, we managed to create . What is the last undergrad hackathon for most of our group was a blast, and with much vigor and little sleep, we finished strong :)
The ML embeddings were super fun to work with and in the final hoorah when putting everything together, the integration was one celebration after the next.
What's next for PhotoBomb
We'd love to continue working on this project! It makes a wonderful proof of concept for a counter to the current model of media ownership, which is at the forefront of the conversation in culture. With malicious actors taking advantage of DeepFakes for bad purposes, ownership of likeness is more relevant now than ever, and we'd like to shift towards that direction should the technology allow for it.
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