Rubbrband (YC W23) – Deformity detection for AI-generated images

Hey HN! We’re Jeremy, Abhi and Darren from Rubbrband (https://www.rubbrband.com/). Rubbrband is software that evaluates the quality of images generated by Stable Diffusion (or Midjourney, DALL-e, etc…).

We actually stumbled into this idea while working on solving a different problem. While helping a few companies use Stable Diffusion in production, we found that these companies needed to use QA analysts to manually evaluate their images to make sure they were high quality once in prod. This process often took days just to go through thousands of images, so companies that have a text-to-image product with PMF couldn’t guarantee that their images were of high quality.

From our initial set of customers, we found that evaluating the quality of their outputs at scale was an even larger problem than just using the model itself. So we pivoted our company into working on solving this problem using our skills from CV research. All three of us did computer vision research at UC Berkeley, and Abhi worked with John Canny, who invented many CV techniques like the Canny Edge Detector.

We built a product that automates this process using computer vision. We’ve trained in-house several computer vision models that grade images based on different criteria.

These include: - Detecting human deformities, such as a person with 7 fingers on a hand (image generation models generate deformed hands over 80% of the time when generating a photo of a person! This includes the state of the art: Midjourney, SDXL, Runway, etc…); - A score that rates how well the image aligns with the prompt(we do this using our own finetuned Visual Question Answer model); - A composition score (how well composed the image is according to photography “rules”)

Using Rubbrband is pretty simple. You can send an image to us to process via our API or our web app, and you’ll get scores for each of those criteria back on your dashboard in less than 10 seconds. Here is a quick Loom demo: https://www.loom.com/share/961830347b3643dcbb92dfe80f8ca1f0?....

You can filter your images based on certain criteria from the dashboard. For instance, if you want to see all images with deformed eyes, you can click the “deformed eyes” filter at the top of the screen to see all of those images.

We store images generated by your image generation model. We’re like a logging tool for images, with evaluations on top. We currently charge $0.01 per image, with your first 1000 images free.

We’re super excited to launch this to Hacker News. We’d love to hear what you think. Thanks in advance!