Amber AI Technology: How It Works

We often refer to Amber as an AI-Powered Smart Storage Platform – but what does this really mean for users? How does Amber’s AI technology work?

The engineers and computer scientists at LatticeWork have spent a lot of time perfecting the smart technology built into Amber, and we’re proud to be able to share the details with you. Here’s what you need to know!

Smart Technology for the Future

Let’s start with the basics! Artificial Intelligence, or AI, covers a large set of computer algorithms, including Neural Nets, that mimics human intelligence. It can perform tasks that we normally associate with human abilities, like visual perception, decision-making, speech recognition, and language translation. Pretty impressive, right?

Then there’s machine learning (ML), a subset of artificial intelligence, which involves data analysis through automated analytical model building. Basically, the computer system “teaches” itself how to perform specific tasks by identifying patterns and making inferences with minimal human intervention.

Our Smart Storage platform, Amber, uses AI that includes both neural nets and machine learning to provide state-of-the-art data organization. As data is being backed up on Amber, our on-device AI coupled with Intel CPU gives us the processing power to “automagically” organize your photos. This way, you can enjoy the latest cutting-edge technology while your personal data always stays with you – never sent off to a third-party commercial cloud, where you could lose control of how your data is exploited by others.

Amber AI Features in a Nutshell

So what does Amber’s AI technology offer? First and foremost, it makes it easy to use for the average consumer. You’ll appreciate the seamless and powerful processing done in the background, with very little input required from you!

Here’s what you get:

• Image processing that recognizes faces and objects, detects themes and events using AI algorithms from the photos stored on Amber – all performed right on the device itself.
• Automatic indexing in real time that runs in the background whenever you backup photos and videos from a mobile device or PC.
• A user-friendly interface in the Amber Companion Apps to easily search for photos and videos that contain faces, objects like pets and food, themes like sports and the outdoors, etc. – from anywhere with an Internet connection.
• AI engine that gets smarter over time. Our Engineering team is hard at work implementing even more AI features for you. For example, you will soon be able to have Amber automatically organize all those videos you have as well! Imagine how much time you save looking for the video that contain your son’s sports game activity when you want to share it to his grandparents!

Facial indexing is something you may have already come across on other platforms, but Amber takes it to a whole new level, and keeping your data private!

How Amber Facial Recognition Technology Works

Amber’s facial recognition technology is a background process on the device as well as a user interface that allows you to browse, view, and edit “collections” of photos + videos organized by face. Here’s how the technology process works:

1. Detects each photo and video file that is uploaded to Amber, regardless of whether it’s coming from Camera Roll backup, sync, or simply copied from a PC.
2. Performs AI face detection (to detect a person’s face and remember its location in the image) as well as face feature extraction (i.e. taking a small picture of each face and feeding it to a so called “deep neural network” to extract the face feature, which is a series of numbers that can uniquely identify one particular face) on each new photo, so that Amber can remember which pictures contain specific faces and their corresponding face features.
3. Recognizes faces with similar features as one individual person and groups them using a clustering algorithm (and if there are many faces whose features are different enough, Amber will generate multiple groups reflecting the total number of different people in the images).
4. Displays these face groups in the user interface so you can choose to view only photos containing a specific person, for instance.

After the AI algorithm performs face detection and extraction using the deep neural networks (DNN) and convolutional neural network (CNN), that’s where our proprietary machine learning algorithm comes in. It’s a crucial part of the process because no AI algorithm is perfect!

To help the machine learning algorithm get started, all you need to do is make a correction if the AI classifies data incorrectly. For example, if someone’s face is misidentified and placed in the wrong face group, you simply move the photo into the correct group. This trains the machine learning model to perform faster and more accurate face classification over time – with less and less input from you!

Finally, photo metadata can be combined with the face tags generated by the above algorithms, so when you browse photos containing a specific person, you can also sort them by other data like date/time and location. This gives you ultimate organizational capability with so many search possibilities.

Effortless Object Recognition and Search

Our AI algorithm will even detect different categories of objects (pets, food, gadgets, etc.) and themes (indoor, outdoor, sports, party, etc.). The way it works is similar to the facial indexing process described above, with different tags presented on the user interface for easy browsing and search.

On top of that, you’ll soon be able to search by individual faces simply by clicking on a face in a photo, which then brings up all photos that contain that person. Or search a combination of face, date/time, and location data through either the voice command or the common user interface.

As mentioned previously, we are hard at work to ensure that Amber’s powerful AI facial indexing works for videos, too! No more scrolling through a video from beginning to end just to see if it contains a specific person – soon all you will need to do is refer to the video player interface that shows exactly who is in each video and the time frame they appear in. To make things even more convenient, you can jump directly to the places in the video where a specific person appears.

What Makes Amber’s AI Special?

We use only best-in-class open source codes for our AI face detection / extraction and object detection algorithms. All of our other algorithms are proprietary – specially developed by the experts here at LatticeWork – such as our clustering / classification logic and the machine learning algorithm trained by user input.

Most importantly, our AI implementation runs entirely on your Amber device according to your preferences. Instead of a search mindset (where the results of searches may be different each time), our AI operates with a storage mindset so you can organize your data consistently and always find the same thing in the same place.

You may have come across photo apps from big names like Apple and Google that provide photo albums sorted by face, but they don’t make it easy for you to further sort, organize, and even share these face-organized albums!

Amber, on the other hand, gives you so many options:

• Organize photos and soon videos exactly the way you want
• Add new faces and hide unknown faces - as desired
• Easily make corrections - if needed
• Further sort by date/time, location, object, and theme, all under face groups
• Create your own photo and video albums
• Easily and securely share with friends and contacts

Whatever changes you make; you’ll always be able to find your photos just the way you organized them!

So Why Amber?

Our cutting-edge AI technology will not only detect and recognize data like other platforms do, but also learn from how you like your data to be organized and presented… with the added advantage of always finding the photos and videos you want, easily and consistently.

With Amber, you own and control your data – fully and completely – and you get to enjoy unparalleled security and privacy along with convenience. Our feature-rich, consumer-focused smart storage platform helps make your digital life as smooth as possible to navigate, with other amazing benefits we haven’t even mentioned yet, like high-speed WiFi, media streaming, multi-user support, localized double data backup, the personal hybrid cloud storage model, and much more.

Plus, with software versions that upgrade for free, Amber will only get better over time! Your one-time purchase is an investment for your future and your cherished digital memories, and it helps fund us to develop more features for you. To learn more, check out our FAQ page and explore whether Amber is the better storage solution for your personal and data privacy needs.