Gathering Data

For many types of projects, you may be able to find all the data you need online. The project we’ll be completing in this chapter is a bear detector. It will discriminate between three types of bear: grizzly, black, and teddy bears. There are many images on the internet of each type of bear that we can use. We just need a way to find them and download them. We’ve provided a tool you can use for this purpose, so you can follow along with this chapter and create your own image recognition application for whatever kinds of objects you’re interested in. In the fast.ai course, thousands of students have presented their work in the course forums, displaying everything from hummingbird varieties in Trinidad to bus types in Panama—one student even created an application that would help his fiancée recognize his 16 cousins during Christmas vacation!

At the time of writing, Bing Image Search is the best option we know of for finding and downloading images. It’s free for up to 1,000 queries per month, and each query can download up to 150 images. However, something better might have come along between when we wrote this and when you’re reading the book, so be sure to check out the book’s website for our current recommendation.

important: Keeping in Touch With the Latest Services: Services that can be used for creating datasets come and go all the time, and their features, interfaces, and pricing change regularly too. In this section, we’ll show how to use the Bing Image Search API available at the time this book was written. We’ll be providing more options and more up to date information on the book’s website, so be sure to have a look there now to get the most current information on how to download images from the web to create a dataset for deep learning.