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Chasing Cats
- danso 10y agoThe content of this article is pretty cool...but if I had to come up with a HN title that a deep learning process would surmise would do extremely well, it would be literally this. Or maybe "Show HN: How to use deep learning to optimize honey production from beehives" edit: The title of the submission has been changed; originally, it was something like "Using Deep Learning to Keep Cats off the Lawn"
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- minimaxir 10y agoAlthough incredibly off topic (the Cats = upvotes meme isn't even true on Reddit), a submission title's phrasing is not the primary cause of a HN story's success/failure. (and the proposed Show HN would make me raise an eyebrow in thinking the post is linkbait and cause me to flag it)
- bobwaycott 10y agoWhy would you flag something based on the title alone? That seems to be an abuse of the flagging privilege.
- minimaxir 10y agoIn my experience, there is a high correlation between linkbaity titles and spammy content. (I can unflag if necessary, but that has been rare) The official rule is to flag if the content is spammy/off-topic.
- reitanqild 10y agoDid I read you correctly? Flagging first without reading in deed seems like abuse of flags. (Possible exceptions for very obvious offenders against site guidelines.)
- minimaxir 10y agoExact quote from the guidelines: > If you think a story is spam or off-topic, flag it by clicking on its 'flag' link.
- bobwaycott 10y agoI think the issue here is flagging a story without bothering to check the story. Excluding obvious dupes, the recent article posted for Greek sex escorts, and similarly irrefutable garbage, you have no defensible basis for flagging on title alone. Real-world example: There have been a couple articles recently posted with titles such as "Do X with all the things using this one weird trick". The articles were solid, informative, and on-topic, despite the otherwise regrettable titles. I even complained about the titles in the comments, but not the content. I could only make this judgment by reading the articles and denying my flag-hammer until I knew they weren't garbage. I think we're disagreeing on a difference between the proverbial letter and spirit of the law/guidelines.
- bobwaycott 10y agoI'm aware of the guidelines. You can't flag for content being spammy or off-topic if you don't actually check the content, right? Hence, flagging based on titles, linkbaity or not, still seems an abuse and a failure to judiciously apply the flag-hammer privilege.
- danso 10y agoAh I meant less that the title itself would get upvotes, and more that the title reflects the kind of content popular on HN. Deep learning, of course. And cats, though a quick search on Algolia reveals fewer 100+ upvoted cat stories than I would anecdatally assume. Would love someday to see a survey of cat vs. dog owners among HN users (though it'd be heavily biased towards urban dwellers, e.g. SF and NY, in which cats might be the more practical choice)
- mnort9 10y agoThis is gold
- jacobsladder 10y agoWhy does this guy hates cats so much?
- teen 10y agoHe doesn't hate cats, he just hates them dry.
- wila 10y agoLOL
- sjm-lbm 10y agoDoes he hate cats? He's simply making his yard less attractive to cats in a way that does not harm his usage of his lawn. The cats don't get harmed other than getting wet, which they don't like.. but is pretty harmless. I actually am a little tempted to blow some time implementing something similar this weekend, because an unknown animal keeps leaving droppings in my backyard at random times. I'm less annoyed with that specifically, and more just curious about the phantom pooper in general. And, well, by the time I have the pictures figured out.. I have a Rachio, which means I can turn the sprinklers on through an API call anyway.
- rconti 10y agoI'm not even convinced they don't like water. My cats sure jump down from the table in a hurry if I spray them with a spray bottle, but then they jump right back up a minute later. I think they like the game more than they dislike being sprayed, sadly.
- zippergz 10y agoI'm probably one of the biggest cat lovers you'll ever meet, but I don't see a problem with this. It's his yard, so he has the right to decide who hangs out there, and a lawn sprinker is a relatively humane (yet effective) deterrent.
- developer2 10y agoChances are the cats are digging in his yard/garden/flower bed and leaving feces everywhere, or leaving dead animals in his yard. Outdoor cats are destructive pests; it should be illegal to allow pet cats to roam freely outdoors. If you think it's "natural" and your cats should be free to roam, then you simply should not own cats. Your cat is not just "visiting neighbours". It is destroying other people's yards and killing off local bird populations. Yet you don't care, because it's out of sight and out of mind. All you care about is how you feel for allowing your cat to be free, while shunning all responsibility for how your cat is impacting others. People who keep "outdoor cats" remind me of an acquaintance I once knew who owned birds with clipped wings, kept in tiny cages for 23-24 hours a day. Her reasoning for not finding it morally reprehensible? "Well these exotic birds cannot survive our Canadian winters, they need to be kept indoors!". So... you're buying exotic birds that do not belong in our climate, mutilating them, imprisoning them... and somehow manage to revamp the logic in your head to make yourself their savior? I hope one day aliens come to our planet, put us all in 10x10 foot cages after severing our spinal columns so we can't walk, while making sure to let us know it's for our own good and has nothing to do with their own agenda. Or the aliens can come and cohabitate with us, but let their human-eating pets roam outdoors and deny any responsibility for those pets' actions.
- aab0 10y agoHow necessary is the deep model there? It seems like a simple motion detector would work just as well since he doesn't mention using the lawn himself.
- emeraldd 10y agoLooks like there is a sidewalk through the lawn. Which probably means using a motion detector would force him to sacrifice using the front door.
- Faaak 10y agoYou could either: 1) set the motion detection area only on the lawn 2) Set a delay for like > 30s movement 3) Set times of movement (ie. when they're at work) But the big question is: did it work ?
- TeMPOraL 10y agoIf you create any kind of safe path in such a system, the cat will learn it quickly too. One simpler way to go IMO would be to put the system at ground level and use two motion detectors, one aimed specifically to "see" only things that are a meter or more above the ground. Humans would trigger both, but the cat would only trigger the one aimed at the ground.
- jerf 10y agoSee, the advantage with that plan is that even if the cats figure out how to bypass that system, now you can assuage the pain of failure by filming the cats leaping across your yard like pogo sticks and monetize the video on YouTube. Tens of millions of views guaranteed.
- dharma1 10y agoSemantic segmentation/FCN isn't necessary since the spray isn't targeting the cat location specifically - you could just use a whole image classifier. You don't need a TX1 either, you could run this on a spare phone https://www.tensorflow.org/mobile.html https://www.tensorflow.org/mobile.html http://mxnet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/how_to/smart_device.html http://mxnet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/how_to/smart_device.ht... https://github.com/jetpacapp/DeepBeliefSDK https://github.com/jetpacapp/DeepBeliefSDK
- anexprogrammer 10y agoWhy doesn't he just get a dog?
- dzolvd 10y agoSo he likes dogs doing their business in his yard but not cats?
- dzolvd 10y agoMissed that there were specific culprits: "the neighbors' cats"
- js2 10y agoSquirrel hunting, also using a water deterrent and Python: https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/kgrandis/pycon-2012-militarizing-your-backyard-computer-vision-and-the-squirrel-hordes https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/kgrandis/pycon-2012-milita...
- dejv 10y agoThere is also video of this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPgqfnKG_T4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPgqfnKG_T4
- RickS 10y agoThis is great. There's a project that's the inverse as well: http://www.quantumpicture.com/Flo_Control/flo_control.htm http://www.quantumpicture.com/Flo_Control/flo_control.htm A door that only lets cats in, based on image recognition. As an aside, I've really enjoyed the particle photon so far. It was a little wonky at first when they didn't have persistent storage of state changes, but now that's up and running, it's flawless. It runs the lights in my house (via a relay just like OP) and has recovered from a few power outages with no attention necessary from me.
- zippergz 10y agoI've used Photons for a bunch of projects, and they're great. They do sometimes get into weird states that require a reboot. And I'm not a huge fan of the web IDE, but there are workarounds (and sometimes I just bite the bullet and deal with it). However, regardless of those complaints, it's a fun platform for projects, and it has almost completely replaced my use of Arduinos at this point.
- jc4p 10y agoI own a lot of Photons (and Spark Cores! :P), I've even bought large amounts for hands-on classes, but I've fallen in love with the ESP8266. You can program it using a custom build of the Arduino IDE (if you want), one of my projects lives off a cheap 3.7V battery pack for weeks at a time. I love it! My favorite time spent with hardware hacks was in my AVR and PICAXE days, the ESP8266 gives me the best feelings about those + modern conveniences. The future is looking really exciting too, Particle's new cellular chips open up a lot of possibilities (especially with their out of the box no-need-to-use-a-dynamic-dns-system), and I will definitely litter my apartment with ESP32s -- built-in bluetooth 4.2, that can talk to the built-in bluetooth on my new Raspberry Pis, I love 2016!
- rashkov 10y agoYou're excitement is definitely contagious! I'm always wondering what people do with these things though? What kind of projects? Just getting started with electronics myself and not quite sure what to make of microcontrollers yet.
- alexandrerond 10y agoI had expected information on how to tell cats apart from other moving things. Looks like this can be easily achieved with a raspberry pi, the PiCam and the motion software.
- mmanfrin 10y agoA similar DIY approach to dealing with cats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goZ2DqMnaGc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goZ2DqMnaGc
- anotherevan 10y agoHadn't seen his second video! Here's his first attempt which is also quite entertaining. https://youtu.be/uIbkLjjlMV8 https://youtu.be/uIbkLjjlMV8
- pmille5 10y agoWhat did those cats do to him...?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rconti 10y agoOnly guess is crawling on cars and leaving little paw-prints, that's the only common thing I can think of. Occasionally known for getting up under the hood or something, which doesn't turn out so well for the cat, either. Though I'm sure individual cats could have their own undesirable quirks. With dogs, you get the pooping (which is at least half an owner problem), squirrels dig up my yard, gophers same, ants all over the place. Can't say I've ever had an issue with cats, but I trust the creator of the project has a reason, and as a cat lover, I'd laugh my ass off at video of a cat getting hit by surprise sprinklers.
- CaptSpify 10y agoCats poop too! And flower gardens are some of their favorite spots, because the dirt is so easy to kick back up.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoAlso my cats like to bite on flowers. Don't know why, they just do.
- kbart 10y agoCats do need to eat grass. If they didn't have access to grass, they eat any other plant they can find, including flowers. They do that to clean their digestion system from inedible parts(1), as for a home cat, that's mostly their own furballs. "Cats regurgitate when they eat grass because they lack the necessary enzymes to break down vegetable matter. Does this mean your cat likes to throw up? Well, while it's doubtful that kitty enjoys the act, this up-chucking sensation may eliminate all indigestible matter from the cat's digestive tract, making it feel a whole lot better. This is important because cats eat their prey as is, including both the edible and inedible parts (fur, bones, feathers, etc.)" 1. http://www.petmd.com/cat/wellness/evr_ct_eating_grass http://www.petmd.com/cat/wellness/evr_ct_eating_grass
- wNk6A23YB 10y agoCool project yo. But can you flip a switch or something to make it attract life instead of repelling it?
- dharma1 10y agowonder if it works at night. This proved to be too much to crack for a Pascal VOC trained model I tried - https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61pY4UVbHxL._SL256_.jpg https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61pY4UVbHxL...
- aab0 10y agoYou could try finetuning training; take the Pascal imageset, do image augmentation (ImageMagick has routines for darkening and 'midnight'-coloring images) to mimic nightime appear; retrain.
- soared 10y agoAn SSD for this makes all me and all my HDDs want to cry.
- byuu 10y agoI definitely want this system! But instead of cats, I want it to detect Fedex and UPS delivery drivers. And instead of turning on the sprinklers, I want it to ring my doorbell so that I know there's a package sitting on my front porch.
- BinaryIdiot 10y agoI need this too. We have a Kuna installed on our front door and it's as if all delivery people know it's there and they try their hardest to avoid its detection. I've seen UPS and USPS walk in very odd ways that just barely don't appear on camera and cranking the sensitivity up ends up catching all passing cars on our semi-busy road. I haven't found a good balance and they almost never ring the doorbell even if it's raining.
- simmons 10y agoI need that, too! (Why can't FedEx be bothered to ring the doorbell?) I sometimes wonder if instead of video, it might be easier to do audio analysis to detect the sound of the UPS truck, which tends to be rather unique in my neighborhood.
- Motomorgen 10y agoTurns out my dog is a finely tuned audio analysis system capable of detecting UPS, USPS and Fedex vehicles within a half mile range.
- knicholes 10y agoInstead of ringing the doorbell, it could send a text-message. That way, if you have sleeping babies, you won't end up having to deal with them waking.
- nostromo 10y agoA guy did something similar, but manual, to keep people from peeing in the alley behind his building. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r77lEmGaCXI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r77lEmGaCXI I bet people would pay real money for a system like this.
- Mao_Zedang 10y agoThat was extremely an funny video
- a-seeing-cue 10y agoYou don't need a fully convolutional network, just a regular CNN for image recognition
- Qwertious 10y agoFor some reason, I expected this to be a sequel to "Chasing Ice".
- 6502nerdface 10y agoI remember back when Slashdot was cool (i.e., 2002), there was a post [0] about a guy who built [1] a cat-door with attached camera and software that could detect whether the cat was carrying something in its mouth, and only allow the cat to enter the house if not. [0] http://slashdot.org/story/24258 http://slashdot.org/story/24258 [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20010405175311/http://quantumpicture.com/Flo_Control/flo_control.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20010405175311/http://quantumpic...
- EvanAnderson 10y agoFlo Control! Yes! The daily picture archives on the site were great. I especially liked the ones where other neighborhood animals (a skunk and a raccoon, if memory serves) tried to get in and were denied admittance.
- chrissnell 10y agoLet's not forget another back-in-the-old-days Slashdot favorite, the Bender Defender! The guy that built a cat motion detector in Linux and used it to trigger a blender and strobe lights! http://www.plasma2002.com/blenderdefender/ http://www.plasma2002.com/blenderdefender/
- fao_ 10y agoIt's probably easier to find something smelly the cat hates (Like a vapour rub), and place that where you don't want the cat to go.
- fao_ 10y agoI understand that this is taboo, but I am utterly baffled as to why I lost karma for this. Creating a system to traumatise a cat is objectively more harmful than making areas you don't want a cat to go repulsive to the cat. I've seen the latter method work beautifully with nervous cats, kittens, older cats, etc. Whereas I would have reservations about using the former method with those types of cats because it serves to be startling and traumatic to a cat.
- addled 10y agoAnd when he gets old and crotchety, he can train the model on children as well.
- yoo1I 10y agoI like how he's training a neural network to, in turn, train the cats to avoid his lawn.
- discardorama 10y agoI have a problem with my neighbor's cats deciding to pee and poop in my front yard. I decided to go with a few of these: https://www.amazon.com/PetSafe-KIT19001-SSScat/dp/B000RIA95G https://www.amazon.com/PetSafe-KIT19001-SSScat/dp/B000RIA95G . They worked reasonably well, but the cats have learned that if they run quickly past one, it won't hiss. So now I'm thinking of modifying them so they use an IR beam, and a beam interruption would trigger the hiss. The eternal battle goes on.
- jc4p 10y agosince the sprayers have a configurable spray width I think you could get pretty far with some sort of wide-angle sensor (a few ultrasonic range finders, or maybe a Kinect?) placed at one long-edge end of the lawn and use that to trigger sprayers laid out perpendicular to the camera.
- mrfusion 10y agoYou can leave that outdoors? Would it keep birds away from blueberries?
- discardorama 10y agoI've left it outdoors, and it's still working. I did cover the top (where the batteries are) with some plastic to prevent water from going in. It should work against birds, as long as the IR detector can sense a change. The bird must stay in one place for a couple of seconds at least.
- kadder 10y agoI was looking at something like this for my dog .... Wow - |via http://bit.ly/hnbuzz01 http://bit.ly/hnbuzz01 |
- asimuvPR 10y agoI do enjoy how overly complicated this is. Wonder what we will be building in five years.
- ASalazarMX 10y agoI fear in a few decades we would buy a cheap robot and command it to scare the cats perpetually.
- abhi152 10y agoDid the Cat's behavior change ?
- gerbilly 10y agoHow about using wolf urine as a repellent? https://www.predatorpeestore.com/wolf-urine-for-bobcat-problems.html https://www.predatorpeestore.com/wolf-urine-for-bobcat-probl...