8 ms·

Predator Object Tracking Algorithm

460 points by helwr 16y ago

chops 16y ago
Wow, this is pretty amazing stuff. I sincerely hope this guy makes a pile of money off this.
pyrhho 16y ago
Bah! I was hoping to download the source (from here: http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Z.Kalal/tld.html http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Z.Kalal/tld.html) and check out his algorithm, but he requires you to email him with his project. If anyone knows how the algorithm works, or where it is described in detail, I'd love to read that! Absolutely amazing stuff!
- mrleinad 16y ago
  What if you just... email him and ask for it?
  - pyrhho 16y ago
    Don't really have a project, just curiousity...
    - ElliotH 16y ago
      I certainly intend to drop him an email and see if he's willing to share his stuff with an interested compsci undergrad. It's always worth asking - he's probably just doing it for metrics.
      - Devilboy 16y ago
        Let us know what happens please, I'm also interested.
  - reemrevnivek 16y ago
    Well, you might join a plethora of other HN readers who also email him asking for a copy, and he might just remove the GPLv2 notice and "postpone the release of [the] source code until announced otherwise"
- masklinn 16y ago
  He's published 4 papers on the subject (they're available at the bottom of the page) why not start there?
- daralthus 16y ago
  Hopefully he will put it back, with a donation button ;)
jallmann 16y ago
Technical details here, with links to relevant papers at the bottom. http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Z.Kalal/tld.html http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Z.Kalal/tld.html
- julianc 16y ago
  Unfortunately you cannot download the source code, the link is disabled. And the GPL license he says he is using requires that the source code must be available for download without any restrictions like "send me an email" or "create an acount". Edit: I sent him an email :)
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - bpodgursky 16y ago
    Doesn't the GPL only require you to release the code if you publicly release the software binaries? I was under the impression that if you only released the results (aka his research and papers) you aren't required to make the source open.
  - nolanw 16y ago
    He's licensing the code to you under the GPL. He's free to use his own code however he likes.
    - reemrevnivek 16y ago
      ...and you're free to redistribute it!
      - nolanw 16y ago
        Consider it done.
        reemrevnivek 16y ago
sp332 16y ago
With something like this we could have truly “Minority Report” style human-computer interface. Actually, the guy who invented the Minority Report interface commercialized it and has been selling it for years. Product website: http://oblong.com http://oblong.com Edit better video: http://www.ted.com/talks/john_underkoffler_drive_3d_data_with_a_gesture.html http://www.ted.com/talks/john_underkoffler_drive_3d_data_wit...
- rbarooah 16y ago
  Which is presumably what Microsoft means when they say "The next PC is the room".
- extension 16y ago
  Predator doesn't need gloves
  - sp332 16y ago
    Well, he mentioned a "Minority Report"-style interface, and there it is. At least they could use cooler gloves: http://singularityhub.com/2010/05/28/mits-ridiculously-colorful-glove-is-the-latest-hand-tracking-interfacevideo/ http://singularityhub.com/2010/05/28/mits-ridiculously-color... :)
exit 16y ago
> Can Predator be used to stabilize and navigate a Quadcopter? > That is not straightforward. anyone know why not?
- extension 16y ago
  Probably because this is just 2D tracking rather than 3D mapping. But tracking can be applied to mapping, for example: http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~gk/PTAM/ http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~gk/PTAM/ So the question is, can predator be used to improve mapping? AFAIK, that would require a) automatically selecting trackable objects and b) tracking many of them simultaneously. That PTAM technique tracks thousands, but with tracking this reliable, you might get by with much less. So, more work is required to apply it to mapping, but I have to imagine it could be done. And seeing how well predator adapts to changes in scale, orientation, and visibility, I suspect it could improve mapping considerably.
  - y0ghur7_xxx 16y ago
    "AFAIK, that would require a) automatically selecting trackable objects and b) tracking many of them simultaneously." I'm not really sure I understood you, but this two problems are already solved. Hugin[1] for example has automatic control point generation for photo stitching. Were you talking about something else? [1]http://hugin.sourceforge.net/releases/2010.4.0/en.shtml http://hugin.sourceforge.net/releases/2010.4.0/en.shtml
    - extension 16y ago
      Yeah, there are many ways to detect features but I haven't read the paper yet and I don't know what kind of features it wants and if there are any problems with choosing them automatically. Like, can it group features into distinct objects without a human pointing them out?
- Devilboy 16y ago
  There are much easier existing algorithms that are currently used by, for example, the Parrot AR Drone so using this for that would not be optimal.
d2 16y ago
This is massively ground breaking. You'll get it if you've used motion tracking on several game interfaces and had to make perfectly white backgrounds with bright lights to make it work. This is incredibly accurate - really game changing stuff.
- d2 16y ago
  Also the applications are enourmous. Watch the end of the video for ideas. For example, it will be a huge enabler in robotics and some of the quadcopter applications you've been seeing.
- jallmann 16y ago
  >This is massively ground breaking. Sounds like you're used to bad algorithms. I think there is a serious disconnect between the state of the art in computer vision and what's used in industry. The demo was cool, but the techniques are not that revolutionary. From a cursory glance through the papers, it is basically AdaBoost (for detection) and Lucas-Kanade (for tracking), with a few extensions. Not to discount the guy's work at all, it's very cool and does a good job of pulling together existing algorithms. But not groundbreaking in the sense of, say, Viola-Jones was for object detection.
  - liuliu 16y ago
    I think that it has an online-training algo for their 2-bit binary pattern as well. Haven't checked out the paper yet though.
    - newhouseb 16y ago
      Yeah, pruning and growing random forests (whatever that's formally called)
  - newhouseb 16y ago
    Spot on. There's a lot of current work going on that effectively splits computer vision into multiple parallel tasks for better results but uses previously well known techniques (PTAM is another good example). As an aside, I read through the paper and it doesn't look like this could track, say, your index finger separately from other fingers if, for a moment, your hand was occluded. This pretty much bars using this exclusively in a Minority Report style interface (you would need hand pose tracking like the stuff Kinect does). Though, I'm just re-iterating your point that this isn't the second coming of computer vision. That being said, there are some really good ideas here.
BoppreH 16y ago
The face recognition part was too good for not picking up the face of other people. Or was it detecting just the most similar face? But facial recognition aside, the uses are endless. If it can be brought to the same level Kinect drivers are at, but with finger tracking and no custom hardware, this could change everything.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
ChuckMcM 16y ago
As this doesn't seem like an April fools joke (some of the papers were published last year :-)) its interesting to think about it in the context of what it might change. That being said I don't doubt for a minute that the university has locked up as much of the technology as possible in patents but that is another story. We can speculate about what it will be like in 20 years when people can do this without infringing :-) Clearly it could be applied immediately to robotic manufacturing. Tracking parts, understanding their orientation, and manipulating them all get easier when its 'cheap' to add additional tracking sensors. Three systems sharing data (front, side, top) would give some very good expressive options for motion based UIs or control. Depending on how well the computational load can be reduced to hardware small systems could provide for head mounted tracking systems. (see CMUCam [1] for small) The training aspect seems to be a weak link, in that some applications would need to have the camera 'discover' what to track and then track it. A number of very expensive object tracking systems used by law enforcement and the military might get a bit cheaper. Photographers might get a mode where they can specify 'take the picture when this thing is centered in the frame' for sports and other high speed activities. Very nice piece of work. [1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cmucam/ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cmucam/
- extension 16y ago
  Depending on how well the computational load can be reduced to hardware small systems could provide for head mounted tracking systems He's clearly developing it on his laptop with a shitty webcam. That's why this is amazing. Screw robotic manufacturing, this is for my phone.
  - newhouseb 16y ago
    Phone != Laptop. It says he's running on a "Intel Core 2 Duo CPU 2.4 GHz, 2 GB RAM" according to his website. As a good rule of thumb, computer vision runs about an order of magnitude slower (10x) on a phone (like an iPhone) than on a desktop/laptop. Also - a crappy webcam actually makes things computationally easier because there's less data to deal with. In a lot of computer vision algorithms the first step is to take input and resize it to something that can be computed on in a reasonable time frame.
6ren 16y ago
The key thing seems not to be the specific algorithm, but the idea of using images obtained during performance for training - an algorithm that can do that. An early prototype algorithm, with lots of room for tweaking - and there are likely radically different learning algorithms, as yet untried or undiscovered, that work better. It seems that in the past, performance images has been religiously separated from training image. It reminds me of early approaches for robot walking, which tried to plan everything out, and more recent approaches of incorporating feedback - which turned out to be much simpler and work better. Sort of waterfall vs. agile. It seems a tad unreliable (his "mouse pointer" was lost a few times while still on screen), but this is still a prototype. It's really impressive how the panda was tracked in 360 orientations - probably helped by the distinctive colouring. New input devices (this, kinect, multi-touch) and applications that can really use them, may be a main source of disruptive innovation in computers for the next decade or two.
- liuliu 16y ago
  Not to dismiss the importance, but the idea is used in developing Ensemble Tracking: http://www.merl.com/projects/ensemble-tracking/ http://www.merl.com/projects/ensemble-tracking/
- jhuckestein 16y ago
  The tracking was incredibly good. The first seconds of each example are a little off because the algorithm doesn't have ANY training data to work with. It's 100% ad-hoc. The tracking improved during the mouse pointer example (which I found incredibly impressive). The point he was making during that example was that it learns the different scales/rotations of objects on the fly and tracking improves automatically.
  - 6ren 16y ago
    Before commenting, I viewed it a second time, pausing it several times (it's at 1:20, if you'd like to confirm the following). After about 10 seconds of training data (500 frames), he starts to draw with it. It loses tracking four times (not counting the two times his hand goes off-screen), and it's not obvious to me why - there don't seem to be major rotations or changes of his finger placement. In practical use, that would be annoying. btw: my comment originally included praise for his work - but I thought his merit was obvious and that it distracted from my comment's point, so I deleted it. Instead, I'll just note that the first telephone also had lots of room for improvement - practically, the first of anything does. The cool thing was the idea of the telephone, and then making it real. How good it was is irrelevant compared with that it became real. It doesn't take away from the immense task of doing something that had not been done before or even imagined. Quality is not as crucial, because once you have the basic thing, it's (relatively) easy to iterate to improve it. I think having the idea and making it real deserves far far greater admiration than the quality of the prototype algorithm and implementation. Just as with the telephone.
donnyg107 16y ago
Every time something like this comes out, I feel us taking a step away from "video camera mounted on a robot where the eyes should be" and a step toward real perception. I always wonder though, if a computer can one day recognize all different types of hands, could it draw a new one?
- Devilboy 16y ago
  To answer your question you can watch this presentation by Prof Hinton: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M He shows how he trained a restricted bolzmann machine to recognize handwritten numbers and how he can run it in reverse as a generative model, in effect the machine 'dreams' about all kinds of numbers that it's not been trained on but nonetheless makes up properly formed legible digits.
dotBen 16y ago
Ok so the fact that he has produced this himself, using off-the-shelf commodity laptops etc is really great. But this technology doesn't seem new to me - technology already exists for surveillance cameras in police and military helicopters to track an object like a car and keep it in vision as the helicopter turns and maneuvers. Likewise, facial recognition - both statically and within a video stream - isn't new either. Not taking anything away from the guy, but just wondering what it is I'm not getting that is new/amazing with this particular implementation?
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
sbierwagen 16y ago
Interesting that TFA mentions "Minority Report-like interfaces" several times when: 1.) The Minority Report interface is the canonical example of a UI that is very impressive visually, and is beautifully mediagenic; but is hideously fatiguing and impractical in a real world scenario. (Hold your hand out at arm's length. Okay, now hold that pose for eight hours.) 2.) The MR UI has actually been commercialized, and has entirely failed to take the world by storm. Also, computer vision demos are trivially easy to fake, and it's even easier to make an impressive demo video. You can have the guy who invented it spend a couple hours in front of the camera trying it over and over, then edit it down to three minutes of the system working perfectly. It wouldn't be nearly as impressive when you have an untrained user trying it live, in the field.
direxorg 16y ago
World becoming a better place with such code available for public to be built up on and not only to military in homing heads. I guess it is one point for "Make something free that was initially available for pay?" Just like "plenty of fish" doing... http://www.vti.mod.gov.rs/vti/lab/e-tv.htm http://www.vti.mod.gov.rs/vti/lab/e-tv.htm
marcomonteiro 16y ago
This looks awesome! I want to build this into apps for iPad 2.
Tycho 16y ago
Uhhh... 'Predator?' What's his next project, SkyNet Resource Planning? This seems like an April fools to me. I mean I'm sure he's done work in the area... but the article is dated April 1 and the previous literature didn't mention 'Predator.' I could be wrong, but it seems too advanced, and scary.
- Tycho 16y ago
  So nobody else found it suspicious that the source code was promised but not actually available. And now not even promised.
elvirs 16y ago
The video where system tracks Roy from IT Crowd sucking his fingers is epic:) http://www.youtube.com/user/ekalic2#p/u/2/tKXX3A2WIjs http://www.youtube.com/user/ekalic2#p/u/2/tKXX3A2WIjs
mrleinad 16y ago
From his webpage at Surrey: "We have received hundreds of emails asking for the source code ranging from practitioners, students, researchers up to top companies. The range of proposed projects is exciting and it shows that TLD is ready to push the current technology forward. This shows that we have created something "bigger" than originally expected and therefore we are going to postpone the release of our source code until announced otherwise. Thank you for understanding." Also, the message where he states the source code is under GPL 2.0 dissapeared. Seems that he chose to leave Richard Stallman empty handed and go to the dark side.
- endian 16y ago
  Did anybody get a GPLv2'd copy?
  - mrleinad 16y ago
    Here you go: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2411459 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2411459
giardini 16y ago
It must be shown what to track. That is, you (or some other external system) define the "object" to be tracked by clicking on a bounding box. A good addition would be an algorithm that automatically delineated "objects" in the visual field, then passed them to Predator. Which raises another question: how many "objects" can Predator simultaneously track (with given horsepower)?
bossjones 16y ago
Extremely impressive. Can't wait to see how this is applied to everyday problems. Kudo's to this gentleman.
helwr 16y ago
Here is the code: https://github.com/abelsson/TLD https://github.com/abelsson/TLD
motters 16y ago
This looks impressive. I've written tracking systems previously, so can appreciate that it's not an easy problem to solve.

460 points by helwr 16y ago

chops 16y ago

Wow, this is pretty amazing stuff. I sincerely hope this guy makes a pile of money off this.

Bah! I was hoping to download the source (from here: http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Z.Kalal/tld.html http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Z.Kalal/tld.html) and check out his algorithm, but he requires you to email him with his project. If anyone knows how the algorithm works, or where it is described in detail, I'd love to read that! Absolutely amazing stuff!

mrleinad 16y ago
What if you just... email him and ask for it?
- pyrhho 16y ago
  Don't really have a project, just curiousity...
  - ElliotH 16y ago
    I certainly intend to drop him an email and see if he's willing to share his stuff with an interested compsci undergrad. It's always worth asking - he's probably just doing it for metrics.
    - Devilboy 16y ago
      Let us know what happens please, I'm also interested.
- reemrevnivek 16y ago
  Well, you might join a plethora of other HN readers who also email him asking for a copy, and he might just remove the GPLv2 notice and "postpone the release of [the] source code until announced otherwise"
masklinn 16y ago
He's published 4 papers on the subject (they're available at the bottom of the page) why not start there?
daralthus 16y ago
Hopefully he will put it back, with a donation button ;)

jallmann 16y ago

Technical details here, with links to relevant papers at the bottom. http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Z.Kalal/tld.html http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Z.Kalal/tld.html

julianc 16y ago
Unfortunately you cannot download the source code, the link is disabled. And the GPL license he says he is using requires that the source code must be available for download without any restrictions like "send me an email" or "create an acount". Edit: I sent him an email :)
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- bpodgursky 16y ago
  Doesn't the GPL only require you to release the code if you publicly release the software binaries? I was under the impression that if you only released the results (aka his research and papers) you aren't required to make the source open.
- nolanw 16y ago
  He's licensing the code to you under the GPL. He's free to use his own code however he likes.
  - reemrevnivek 16y ago
    ...and you're free to redistribute it!
    - nolanw 16y ago
      Consider it done.
      - reemrevnivek 16y ago

sp332 16y ago

With something like this we could have truly “Minority Report” style human-computer interface. Actually, the guy who invented the Minority Report interface commercialized it and has been selling it for years. Product website: http://oblong.com http://oblong.com Edit better video: http://www.ted.com/talks/john_underkoffler_drive_3d_data_with_a_gesture.html http://www.ted.com/talks/john_underkoffler_drive_3d_data_wit...

rbarooah 16y ago
Which is presumably what Microsoft means when they say "The next PC is the room".
extension 16y ago
Predator doesn't need gloves
- sp332 16y ago
  Well, he mentioned a "Minority Report"-style interface, and there it is. At least they could use cooler gloves: http://singularityhub.com/2010/05/28/mits-ridiculously-colorful-glove-is-the-latest-hand-tracking-interfacevideo/ http://singularityhub.com/2010/05/28/mits-ridiculously-color... :)

exit 16y ago

> Can Predator be used to stabilize and navigate a Quadcopter? > That is not straightforward. anyone know why not?

extension 16y ago
Probably because this is just 2D tracking rather than 3D mapping. But tracking can be applied to mapping, for example: http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~gk/PTAM/ http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~gk/PTAM/ So the question is, can predator be used to improve mapping? AFAIK, that would require a) automatically selecting trackable objects and b) tracking many of them simultaneously. That PTAM technique tracks thousands, but with tracking this reliable, you might get by with much less. So, more work is required to apply it to mapping, but I have to imagine it could be done. And seeing how well predator adapts to changes in scale, orientation, and visibility, I suspect it could improve mapping considerably.
- y0ghur7_xxx 16y ago
  "AFAIK, that would require a) automatically selecting trackable objects and b) tracking many of them simultaneously." I'm not really sure I understood you, but this two problems are already solved. Hugin[1] for example has automatic control point generation for photo stitching. Were you talking about something else? [1]http://hugin.sourceforge.net/releases/2010.4.0/en.shtml http://hugin.sourceforge.net/releases/2010.4.0/en.shtml
  - extension 16y ago
    Yeah, there are many ways to detect features but I haven't read the paper yet and I don't know what kind of features it wants and if there are any problems with choosing them automatically. Like, can it group features into distinct objects without a human pointing them out?
Devilboy 16y ago
There are much easier existing algorithms that are currently used by, for example, the Parrot AR Drone so using this for that would not be optimal.

d2 16y ago

This is massively ground breaking. You'll get it if you've used motion tracking on several game interfaces and had to make perfectly white backgrounds with bright lights to make it work. This is incredibly accurate - really game changing stuff.

d2 16y ago
Also the applications are enourmous. Watch the end of the video for ideas. For example, it will be a huge enabler in robotics and some of the quadcopter applications you've been seeing.
jallmann 16y ago
>This is massively ground breaking. Sounds like you're used to bad algorithms. I think there is a serious disconnect between the state of the art in computer vision and what's used in industry. The demo was cool, but the techniques are not that revolutionary. From a cursory glance through the papers, it is basically AdaBoost (for detection) and Lucas-Kanade (for tracking), with a few extensions. Not to discount the guy's work at all, it's very cool and does a good job of pulling together existing algorithms. But not groundbreaking in the sense of, say, Viola-Jones was for object detection.
- liuliu 16y ago
  I think that it has an online-training algo for their 2-bit binary pattern as well. Haven't checked out the paper yet though.
  - newhouseb 16y ago
    Yeah, pruning and growing random forests (whatever that's formally called)
- newhouseb 16y ago
  Spot on. There's a lot of current work going on that effectively splits computer vision into multiple parallel tasks for better results but uses previously well known techniques (PTAM is another good example). As an aside, I read through the paper and it doesn't look like this could track, say, your index finger separately from other fingers if, for a moment, your hand was occluded. This pretty much bars using this exclusively in a Minority Report style interface (you would need hand pose tracking like the stuff Kinect does). Though, I'm just re-iterating your point that this isn't the second coming of computer vision. That being said, there are some really good ideas here.

BoppreH 16y ago

The face recognition part was too good for not picking up the face of other people. Or was it detecting just the most similar face? But facial recognition aside, the uses are endless. If it can be brought to the same level Kinect drivers are at, but with finger tracking and no custom hardware, this could change everything.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

ChuckMcM 16y ago

As this doesn't seem like an April fools joke (some of the papers were published last year :-)) its interesting to think about it in the context of what it might change. That being said I don't doubt for a minute that the university has locked up as much of the technology as possible in patents but that is another story. We can speculate about what it will be like in 20 years when people can do this without infringing :-) Clearly it could be applied immediately to robotic manufacturing. Tracking parts, understanding their orientation, and manipulating them all get easier when its 'cheap' to add additional tracking sensors. Three systems sharing data (front, side, top) would give some very good expressive options for motion based UIs or control. Depending on how well the computational load can be reduced to hardware small systems could provide for head mounted tracking systems. (see CMUCam [1] for small) The training aspect seems to be a weak link, in that some applications would need to have the camera 'discover' what to track and then track it. A number of very expensive object tracking systems used by law enforcement and the military might get a bit cheaper. Photographers might get a mode where they can specify 'take the picture when this thing is centered in the frame' for sports and other high speed activities. Very nice piece of work. [1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cmucam/ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cmucam/

extension 16y ago
Depending on how well the computational load can be reduced to hardware small systems could provide for head mounted tracking systems He's clearly developing it on his laptop with a shitty webcam. That's why this is amazing. Screw robotic manufacturing, this is for my phone.
- newhouseb 16y ago
  Phone != Laptop. It says he's running on a "Intel Core 2 Duo CPU 2.4 GHz, 2 GB RAM" according to his website. As a good rule of thumb, computer vision runs about an order of magnitude slower (10x) on a phone (like an iPhone) than on a desktop/laptop. Also - a crappy webcam actually makes things computationally easier because there's less data to deal with. In a lot of computer vision algorithms the first step is to take input and resize it to something that can be computed on in a reasonable time frame.

6ren 16y ago

The key thing seems not to be the specific algorithm, but the idea of using images obtained during performance for training - an algorithm that can do that. An early prototype algorithm, with lots of room for tweaking - and there are likely radically different learning algorithms, as yet untried or undiscovered, that work better. It seems that in the past, performance images has been religiously separated from training image. It reminds me of early approaches for robot walking, which tried to plan everything out, and more recent approaches of incorporating feedback - which turned out to be much simpler and work better. Sort of waterfall vs. agile. It seems a tad unreliable (his "mouse pointer" was lost a few times while still on screen), but this is still a prototype. It's really impressive how the panda was tracked in 360 orientations - probably helped by the distinctive colouring. New input devices (this, kinect, multi-touch) and applications that can really use them, may be a main source of disruptive innovation in computers for the next decade or two.

liuliu 16y ago
Not to dismiss the importance, but the idea is used in developing Ensemble Tracking: http://www.merl.com/projects/ensemble-tracking/ http://www.merl.com/projects/ensemble-tracking/
jhuckestein 16y ago
The tracking was incredibly good. The first seconds of each example are a little off because the algorithm doesn't have ANY training data to work with. It's 100% ad-hoc. The tracking improved during the mouse pointer example (which I found incredibly impressive). The point he was making during that example was that it learns the different scales/rotations of objects on the fly and tracking improves automatically.
- 6ren 16y ago
  Before commenting, I viewed it a second time, pausing it several times (it's at 1:20, if you'd like to confirm the following). After about 10 seconds of training data (500 frames), he starts to draw with it. It loses tracking four times (not counting the two times his hand goes off-screen), and it's not obvious to me why - there don't seem to be major rotations or changes of his finger placement. In practical use, that would be annoying. btw: my comment originally included praise for his work - but I thought his merit was obvious and that it distracted from my comment's point, so I deleted it. Instead, I'll just note that the first telephone also had lots of room for improvement - practically, the first of anything does. The cool thing was the idea of the telephone, and then making it real. How good it was is irrelevant compared with that it became real. It doesn't take away from the immense task of doing something that had not been done before or even imagined. Quality is not as crucial, because once you have the basic thing, it's (relatively) easy to iterate to improve it. I think having the idea and making it real deserves far far greater admiration than the quality of the prototype algorithm and implementation. Just as with the telephone.

donnyg107 16y ago

Every time something like this comes out, I feel us taking a step away from "video camera mounted on a robot where the eyes should be" and a step toward real perception. I always wonder though, if a computer can one day recognize all different types of hands, could it draw a new one?

Devilboy 16y ago
To answer your question you can watch this presentation by Prof Hinton: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M He shows how he trained a restricted bolzmann machine to recognize handwritten numbers and how he can run it in reverse as a generative model, in effect the machine 'dreams' about all kinds of numbers that it's not been trained on but nonetheless makes up properly formed legible digits.

dotBen 16y ago

Ok so the fact that he has produced this himself, using off-the-shelf commodity laptops etc is really great. But this technology doesn't seem new to me - technology already exists for surveillance cameras in police and military helicopters to track an object like a car and keep it in vision as the helicopter turns and maneuvers. Likewise, facial recognition - both statically and within a video stream - isn't new either. Not taking anything away from the guy, but just wondering what it is I'm not getting that is new/amazing with this particular implementation?

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

sbierwagen 16y ago

Interesting that TFA mentions "Minority Report-like interfaces" several times when: 1.) The Minority Report interface is the canonical example of a UI that is very impressive visually, and is beautifully mediagenic; but is hideously fatiguing and impractical in a real world scenario. (Hold your hand out at arm's length. Okay, now hold that pose for eight hours.) 2.) The MR UI has actually been commercialized, and has entirely failed to take the world by storm. Also, computer vision demos are trivially easy to fake, and it's even easier to make an impressive demo video. You can have the guy who invented it spend a couple hours in front of the camera trying it over and over, then edit it down to three minutes of the system working perfectly. It wouldn't be nearly as impressive when you have an untrained user trying it live, in the field.

direxorg 16y ago

World becoming a better place with such code available for public to be built up on and not only to military in homing heads. I guess it is one point for "Make something free that was initially available for pay?" Just like "plenty of fish" doing... http://www.vti.mod.gov.rs/vti/lab/e-tv.htm http://www.vti.mod.gov.rs/vti/lab/e-tv.htm

marcomonteiro 16y ago

This looks awesome! I want to build this into apps for iPad 2.

Tycho 16y ago

Uhhh... 'Predator?' What's his next project, SkyNet Resource Planning? This seems like an April fools to me. I mean I'm sure he's done work in the area... but the article is dated April 1 and the previous literature didn't mention 'Predator.' I could be wrong, but it seems too advanced, and scary.

Tycho 16y ago
So nobody else found it suspicious that the source code was promised but not actually available. And now not even promised.

elvirs 16y ago

The video where system tracks Roy from IT Crowd sucking his fingers is epic:) http://www.youtube.com/user/ekalic2#p/u/2/tKXX3A2WIjs http://www.youtube.com/user/ekalic2#p/u/2/tKXX3A2WIjs

mrleinad 16y ago

From his webpage at Surrey: "We have received hundreds of emails asking for the source code ranging from practitioners, students, researchers up to top companies. The range of proposed projects is exciting and it shows that TLD is ready to push the current technology forward. This shows that we have created something "bigger" than originally expected and therefore we are going to postpone the release of our source code until announced otherwise. Thank you for understanding." Also, the message where he states the source code is under GPL 2.0 dissapeared. Seems that he chose to leave Richard Stallman empty handed and go to the dark side.

endian 16y ago
Did anybody get a GPLv2'd copy?
- mrleinad 16y ago
  Here you go: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2411459 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2411459

giardini 16y ago

It must be shown what to track. That is, you (or some other external system) define the "object" to be tracked by clicking on a bounding box. A good addition would be an algorithm that automatically delineated "objects" in the visual field, then passed them to Predator. Which raises another question: how many "objects" can Predator simultaneously track (with given horsepower)?

bossjones 16y ago

Extremely impressive. Can't wait to see how this is applied to everyday problems. Kudo's to this gentleman.

helwr 16y ago

Here is the code: https://github.com/abelsson/TLD https://github.com/abelsson/TLD

motters 16y ago

This looks impressive. I've written tracking systems previously, so can appreciate that it's not an easy problem to solve.