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Surveillance technology is one such application already in use (location of faces and people in images), video analytics on google. A much larger market is robo
by un 18y ago
Surveillance technology is one such application already in use (location of faces and people in images), video analytics on google.
A much larger market is robotics. (Factories use robots that are custom programmed with vision for each application and don't really do recongition in the sense of object recognition in an arbitray scene). Recognizing common household objects would be useful for a company building home robots (of which there are a few) right now.
There is a recent startup doing image recognition using humans, on photos at flickr.
Search engines relied on letting a single algorithm go out and process data. There isn't yet an artificial intelligence algorithm that can just go out and do what it needs (unsupervised learning algorithm that works well). The currently available algorithms (supervised learning) require labelled data, and since there are millions of categories of things (that we as humans can percieve and so are useful to recognize), it would require at least a billion labellings of the data (1000 data labellings for each category).
The trouble with companies and groups engineers is that you would have to fund them, organize etc. and only a few groups would form (there are only an handful of video analytics companies probably, all of them probably do recognition of a handful of the same things).
Besides, the system advocated above is pretty simple, hardly any engineering in the sense of specialized technical skill is required. You would just collect and feed data into the classifiers. Others would combine data from classifers into yet more classifiers.
- un 18y agoAnother application is in mobile phones that recognize objects, already being done in japan for certain objects in stores. There was also an application developed for the android platform that did some type of recognization of outdoor environments.
- lacker 18y agoSounds pretty cool. So why don't you make a mobile phone app that recognizes some sort of useful object to recognize? That doesn't sound like it's too big of a project for a startup. Even if a large company was to throw a huge amount of resources at this, they would still probably have a team of a few people make a demo first. They go through the same process as a startup in a sense, first having a few people trial and demo and if it seems good then give them more money and/or engineers.
- un 18y agoMy point is about the "democratization" of classifer creation. I personally am not a programmer and don't have the talent to create a startup, and there are millions more people like me. However, if there were a place where i could feed some data and have a classifier hosted somewhere I could participate in this. It's the same way blogs allowed many more people to start creating content on the web, whereas previously it required creating and hosting a website. Or how google app engine, might increase the creeation of web applications because previously a lot of people didn't have knowledge of administering and scaling unix/dbms based applications. A large company would seriously have a look at roi, whereas many small entrepreneurs just have a go at it. Britannica (large company) is smaller than wikipedia (community of individuals), which is again smaller than the content on the web at large (community of incentivized small entrepreneurs).