Mobile Vision API — Small bumps when getting started with Face Detection

Over the last two weeks, a friend and I have been doing a little bit with the Mobile Vision API in our spare time. Thanks to Moyinoluwa Adeyemi’s articles and Google’s samples we’ve been able to get started.

We encountered a little hiccup when we deployed the first APK. The native libraries required to use the Mobile Vision APIs were not downloading on our emulators and test devices. Making a call to FaceDetector’s isOperational()method returns false to show that the native libraries have not been downloaded completely. After scouring the internet in search of answers, these are a two things we did to make the problem go away. I’ve excluded checking the internet and rebooting the devices — for obvious reasons.

• Ensure there’s up to 500MB of space on the device or emulator.
• Update Google Play Services to latest version. Face detection was disabled for a while due to some bugs on older versions but was re-enabled in version 9.2.

A big challenge is that there’s no way to check the progress of these downloads or if they are even happening at all.

I hope these tips save somebody a few hours in the future.

Cheers!