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A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- raverbashing 5y agoCounting elements from pictures is how old again now? 20 years? 30 years? Sure, it's more reliable and you can run it on a phone. But maybe this could have been solved 20 years ago. (Yes, it might not have been as convenient, but for something that apparently is so important, it could have been applied earlier) Japan, a country which in the 80s was synonymous with technological innovation seems to have slowed down dramatically in adopting new technologies Edit: of course I'm not saying it's exclusive to Japan. My comment was more in the way of "the first time I saw an actual application of CV counting things in a practical setting was 20 years ago"
- krapht 5y agoIf you think old, unoptimized, high-human labor business processes exist only in Japan, have I got a bridge to sell to you.
- jopsen 5y agoOptimizing 100 hours per year to 20 hours isn't much either.. It's 3 days, for that to break even development costs have to very low. Of course, selling it as a generic app for counting things is a great way to do this.
- YokoZar 5y agoThat part of the article confused me too, I think it's later implied they pay that 100 vs 20 hour cost much more often than once a year.
- frosted-flakes 5y agoIt does mentions three months reduction of labour cost, which is a lot more than 80 hours.
- innocenat 5y agoPeople outside IT field generally don't even know how counting thing from picture is very trivial computer vision task. This is common everywhere in the world.
- umangrathi 5y agoAre there any alternatives? Or how one should approach making an app from scratch?
- dpwm 5y agoThe old method used to be template matching, and it probably still works well enough for problems like this. There are almost certainly now better approaches possible using Machine Learning. In my experience, the main challenges with problems like this are dealing with varying lighting, scales, orientation and perspective. These can quickly become of diminishing returns – especially if the solution is provided as an app that provides near-immediate feedback.
- MathYouF 5y agoMy bet is they just invested a few months making a varied dataset, a few grand on mturk using labelme, some image augmentation, a few engineering tricks for a nice UX,some strategies for getting the model to converge on tricky test images, and got it to hit 100% accuracy fairly quickly.
- morsanu 5y agoWe are working on this product in-house for 7 years now. We are an internal startup from a company that does custom computer vision and ML software. No mturk, no tricks, a lot of work in ML and in UX as it is not a very straightforward task.
- earlygray 5y ago> It is not a very straightfoward task. I'd well believe it. I used to write computer vision applications for semiconductor manufacturing equipment and there we were able to strictly control the distance from camera to object, lighting etc. and even still getting necessary reliability was not simple. When a failure could lead to damaging a whole wafer, i.e. hundreds of thousands of dollars, 99% accurate is not good enough.
- gitgud 5y ago> Japan, a country which in the 80s was synonymous with technological innovation seems to have slowed down dramatically in adopting new technologies Japan is not a country I associate with a drop in technology adoption, have you been there? It's like going to the future
- jarenmf 5y agoThey are using an app https://countthings.com/ https://countthings.com/ This seems rather a simple task, however, the app is expensive ($100 per month per device) and limited with the templates for things it can count [1]. [1] https://countthings.com/en/counting-templates https://countthings.com/en/counting-templates
- sva_ 5y agoSeems like a low price if it saves labor costs like in the OP. But they can only ask that price because it's such an obscure niche and other people probably didn't even consider that something like that is needed. Good chance they'll soon have competition. edit: The app has 500k+ downloads and is rated at 3.5/5. People seem to complain about the fact that the templates are so limited. Real opportunity right there I'd guess.
- morsanu 5y agoIt really depends how much time they are losing while manually counting. For most, the price is not high, the employees doing the counting can now focus on other more valuable tasks. We also have pack of 24hour licenses that they can activate when it's inventory time, for example.
- steinuil 5y ago> This seems rather a simple task, however, the app is expensive It's easy to do it in an unreliable way. 1000$ a year doesn't seem very expensive if your business depends on it and you're saving a lot of time like in the OP. > and limited with the templates for things it can count It seems very specialized towards certain businesses, if you have a specific use case that isn't covered I'm guessing you can probably contact them and see if they can add it?
- morsanu 5y agoYou are totally right. We usually work with businesses that have a counting need and we create a new template for their use case.
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- temporalparts 5y agoWow, this is such a simple application of ML and it is incredibly valuable. On their website, they charge $100/month per device or $1000/year per device [0] and I bet they're making a killing. [0] https://countthings.com/en/ https://countthings.com/en/
- dawnerd 5y agoMeanwhile industrial manufacturing have been using vision systems for years to count and inspect items. This solution is waaaaay cheaper than what other alternative packages are. They could probably get away with charging a lot more if they build a lite assembly line style counter that takes in a video feed. (They might already have this, I didn’t look too much into it).
- keeble 5y agoThey can also count items from video https://youtu.be/EoCMUfMO2jw https://youtu.be/EoCMUfMO2jw
- Scea91 5y agoThe difficulty of this depends on the acceptance criteria. I can imagine that the industrial requirements for FP/FN count make this quite an interesting and complicated problem.
- distribot 5y agoI wish I could get a bead on how useful ML is. Hackernews makes me think it’s all hype.
- sneak 5y agoSometimes I feel like the whole ML scene is just stringing me along.
- smichel17 5y agoThe main reason I'm trying to cut down on my HN consumption a bit is the incessant pessimism. While a regular reality check is definitely useful, the "I'm so jaded by everything" vibe makes it hard to get excited about anything. I like being excited by things! It feels good and motivates me. Too much HN is a recipe for lethargy.
- notimetorelax 5y agoTo counter other’s points on pricing - in the end it’s a question of utility vs price. 1k$ per year to cut time to count by 80% may be a great deal to many.
- 6510 5y agowho is responsible now?
- j7ake 5y agoIn this case, it would be reasonable that the person who uses the app would be responsible. The app takes the image and labels every pearl with a number. So the person just needs to check there were no missing or mislabeled pearls, which is much easier than counting.
- 6510 5y agoIn the example I would expect the app to get it right every time. In a more fuzzy setting it would still be faster (thousands of times) and [generally] more accurate but a person can account for how important accuracy is. I guess the numbering added to the image is brilliant. A human can gaze over that and see something wrong right away.
- sellyme 5y agoOf course, but $100 per year to do the same is an even better deal. I can only assume that their support for custom requests is absolutely incredible, because it should be pretty trivial for any potential competitor to put up a similar concept for a tenth of the price and still be making a profit. But that's always the case with enterprise software I suppose. The improvement from 98% to 100% "quality" (whatever that means) is well worth a drastic price hike for most businesses.
- pjc50 5y agoI absolutely expect this to be harder than it looks. If it was easy Google lens would do it. I had a similar shock when trying to do OCR from photos of receipts.
- 6510 5y agoterrible example. You can just make a square from pearls and multiply. If you need to do a lot of it make a box with numbers on the side, tilt it then count and add the remaining row. The weight is probably not irregular enough to justify the tool. There are better examples on the website. Pricing is just silly. I'm sure it is worth that much to some 0.001% of the potential market.
- voiper1 5y agoThe pictures show them as different sizes.
- Clewza313 5y agoNatural pearl sizing varies widely and they aren't perfect spheres either.
- 6510 5y agoYou are going to have to sort them eventually.
- 6510 5y agoThe example with pipes on a truck is that much better. From my experience if you have 100 people count those by hand at least 10 will get it wrong.
- morsanu 5y agoHi, there! I'm one of the project managers at CountThings, I'll try to respond to comments here but I guess you can AMA.
- kasperni 5y agoFirst, this looks amazing. I have a couple of very specific questions. Would it be able to count diamonds? I'm just wondering because the refraction of diamonds is very high. Would it be able to count items located inside clear zip lock bags? Also can it do any kind of categorization of the items? For example, 10 of type X, 20 of type Y?
- joosters 5y agoThere's a 'raw diamonds' counting template listed on https://countthings.com/en/counting-templates https://countthings.com/en/counting-templates The categorization is an interesting question - those templates all seem to be of similar items.
- morsanu 5y agoYes, we should be able to count them if they are visible in the picture. Please email our support with a couple of sample images. We are also doing classification for some of our templates/clients.
- joosters 5y agoHow accurate is the counting? For examples like the case study, I presume your customers will want very close to 100% accuracy, but many other use cases will only need rough numbers. How do you calibrate / verify your app?
- morsanu 5y agoFor most of our clients, we get to 100% accuracy. For some more difficult scenarios, a lower accuracy is ok for estimations (e.g. estimating the crop in agriculture). It's also super easy to correct mistakes or to add items that are not visible in the image.
- choeger 5y agoCouldn't they use a machine like a coin counter?
- amilios 5y agoprobably more difficult because of the irregular sizes of the pearls.
- sellyme 5y agoPearls are going to be far less uniform than coins, a software solution is likely going to have better accuracy.
- TeMPOraL 5y agoThis scales better. Also, going by the pictures in the article, the pearls are of varying sizes, so making a machine to count them would be a tad more tricky. When you're counting things of uniform size and density (like screws or coins, one type at a time), the usual trick is to weigh them all, then weigh a single one, then divide the two numbers.
- nly 5y agoI'm no expert, but I believe Pearl is quite easy to scuff/scratch.
- cesis 5y agoThere exists an entire industry for counting and sorting things(e.g. optical bean sorting). There also are rather cheap optical tachometers(measuring rotations by applying reflective tape on rotating surface). I would guess such devices could also be tailored for counting falling objects. And also there are multiple old- school tricks for similar tasks. E.g. if you need to count nails, weight them all, then weight a single nail, then divide the weights to get count.
- Nition 5y agoPearls come in all different sizes.
- drran 5y agoYes.
- GistNoesis 5y agoThe really fun challenge, is counting how many distinct domains countthings is using for their promotion. You probably need to use Hyperloglog :)
- morsanu 5y agoAfter you complete the challenge, I'll give you the correct answer. Hint: not that many.
- foreigner 5y agoThis is great! A really simple technical idea paired with the right business model = success. I've often wondered if there are other instances of this pattern - a phone app which solves some niche problem and is successful commercially being sold for a high price. Can anybody give other examples?
- _tom_ 5y agoWhy is an advertisement on the top spot on hacker news? Clearly as it has gotten more popular, the need for filtering has gone up. I mean, it is missing any technical background. This is a basic puff piece of content written to promote their site. This should never have gotten on the site.
- faebi 5y ago> All good apps have already been created. There is no room for innovation. > Hold my beer: > I made an app that counts. Honestly, the simplicity of the idea is amazing.
- viraptor 5y agoPeople often don't know what's really needed by businesses until they see the use case. I remember 2 decades ago a family friend making fun of his son's project where they identified bad apples on a processing line in a packing facility. Pretty close to this project. He saw it and still didn't get it.
- geoduck14 5y agoOk, so 1) this sounds immediately valuable to anyone that eats good apples and 2) who makes fun of their own kid (I mean, to the face) Also, as a dad. Parents can be "unpleasant" people- bust so can kids.
- bserge 5y agoNext, an app to identify bad apples heh
- TchoBeer 5y agoTo be fair, a machine that spots bad apples is rather useless, as by the time you spot them the whole bunch is already spoiled.
- viraptor 5y agoLet's assume that the company ordering that project knew what they were doing :-)
- dzhiurgis 5y agoAnd right now as we speak, there's 10s of people on this thread already working on cloning this idea. Some probably gonna make good money.
- xuki 5y agoFor anyone who's complaining about the price, take a look at their whole offer: https://countthings.com/en/counting-templates https://countthings.com/en/counting-templates
- DocTomoe 5y agoCall me naive, but wouldn't this be a lot easier - and more low-tech, thus cheaper, to sort by size with a sieve, then weight individual size-bags, and divide by the size of one pearl? Assuming all pearls have comparative density.
- viraptor 5y agoSo you need to make / order sieves, then get the counting person to sort, bag, weigh the items, calculate results. This will have a lot of mistakes too. And you end up with a process working only with that type of pearls. (Edit: forgot the solution debugging time) The alternative here is to point the phone at a table. The labour costs are relatively high and dominate most business costs. $100/mth is a rounding error in comparison. If you saved 4h of median-us-wage of work a month, it's free.
- La1n 5y agoIs ML here needed? When I was working in a lab we used the opensource ImageJ for counting cells. It seems like it'd do a great job here too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageJ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageJ
- geoduck14 5y agoYes. Yes. 1000 times YES! Why are we having this discussion? Why are people in HN amazed at this? What is wrong with the world where something like THIS is impressive?!?
- wyldfire 5y agoIt's not that it's impressive as a novel approach. It's impressive because they found a market with a need and delivered a product to meet that need. It's simple enough that it seems like an obvious need and yet complex enough that there's not that much competition. ImageJ is suited to the needs of scientists and engineers. Perhaps one could craft a workflow using ImageJ but it would be much less integrated than the mobile app from the article.
- kyawzazaw 5y agoCoz this company is making money. And the customer is satisified.
- flooo 5y agoA colleague of mine recently published a paper on ML-based cell counting for human cancer cells. It's open access and available here https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/11/11/4912 https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/11/11/4912
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fimdomeio 5y agoHumans on the other hand are really good at looking at patterns. I imagine a tray with some recesses that would receive the pearls after a bit of shaking or a funnel that would put all the pearls in a line and then somehow group them/count them should not be that hard to do. And yes outsourcing this to someone else and employing machine learning apparently also works.
- jiofih 5y agoNo need to imagine, there’s a picture of that tray right at the top of the article.
- dan-robertson 5y agoI think that was the old solution: they have a large tray with 100 slots and a bar which allows for multiples of 10 to be counted. The digits are done manually. The problem was that pearls could fall out of the tray and, as they are round, roll around on the floor taking up to 30m to find. It is a mechanism for counting out a specified number rather than determining how many are in a bag, which may be more limited. Another problem was that if workers forgot the partial sum, they would need to start again.
- avibhu 5y agoIn a an image with sufficient contrast between the foreground and the background, thresholding and using the fast radial symmetry transform[1] should do the trick. I have some really old code that I wrote a few years back that does something similar. I was able to use the same algorithm for counting objects in images captured from a Neubauer chamber [2] and saved countless man hours at my university. Disclaimer: the project is really old, and from a time when I barely knew how to code. Lots of bad coding practices et al. Github: https://github.com/vibhuagrawal14/segmentation-of-overlapping-elliptical-objects https://github.com/vibhuagrawal14/segmentation-of-overlappin... [1] https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F3-540-47969-4_24.pdf https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F3-540-47969-... [2] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Images-of-Canis-familiaris-blood-sample-in-a-Neubauer-chamber-acquired-using-focus-a_fig3_315590666 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Images-of-Canis-familiar...
- dkarp 5y agoWould a solution like that work for a video feed where you need to make sure you're not double counting as objects move along?
- omar_kha 5y agoso how would you go about doing this using ml? is it a classification problem? Count the number of instances. Or do we do deep learning and say here is a picture the result is 10?
- hermannj314 5y agoAs someone that has worked in food science micro labs, this is a great product that lab operations would love for CFU counting. Excellent work on a great product. Best of luck to you!
- alexcnwy 5y agoThis is very cool, well done! Are you using deep segmentation models or more traditional computer vision techniques?
- geoduck14 5y agoEveryone here is amazed at the ML applications. You need to know that the underlying technology is really basic and old. 15 years ago, I used a free library (blob counter) to build a VB.net application that counted and "sexed" fruit flies. The app as presented in this website is really similar. No rocket science going on here. Move along, please.
- matsemann 5y agoWhy do I "need to know" that? Why does it matter it's not rocket science?
- NiceWayToDoIT 5y agoI am not impressed, they could cut 1000% by using: big bawl, pipe, simple mechanical sorting mechanism, and electronic counter.
- XCSme 5y agoI am not familiar with pearls, but a mechanical sorting mechanism could damage them I think. Also, how is a mechanical sorting mechanism or an electronic counter simpler, cheaper or faster than a photo?
- NiceWayToDoIT 5y agoI thought pearls are quite strong, but I learned something today, I just learned that Pearl's Mohs hardness is 2.5 (between gypsum and calcite), meaning very soft in comparison to Diamonds (10). I had this video in mind: https://youtu.be/nu7snTgSFeE?t=39 https://youtu.be/nu7snTgSFeE?t=39 They do not look they are gentle with them. Described method has repetitive manual steps: - put pearls in the trey, - take a photo - take out pearls, - put new ones ... These steps do not look like much, but if we are talking about amount shown in video can be hundreds of hours. Phone costs money, and making application costs developer's time and money (so nothing is free) ... Counting device can be made by Lego, so very cheaply, here is simplistic example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YguSl_IekQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YguSl_IekQ Of course device should be made having in mind handling. By the way application probably has a lot of sense for small dealers, or jewelries,
- ladyattis 5y agoOkay, I'm not sure why people use software to do the work that hardware has solved decades ago. Like, I know that pearls come in various shapes, sizes, and weights but they're discrete objects. I would have assumed a simple machine similar to an egg counter would've already been on patent for such uses just for pearls. I mean the ML use case is still neat but I always feel that people always grab computers for the wrong reasons for tasks that aren't that novel. Just my two cents.
- hugh-avherald 5y agoWouldn't an egg counter be much more expensive? To say nothing of customizing it for pearls.
- kyawzazaw 5y agoHardware also has errors. This is a task of a keeping record, verification process.
- bellyfullofbac 5y agoNobody cares that this is just an ad? It's got too many paragraphs of bullshit filler for something that's basically "they're taking pictures and counting the pearls using machine learning".
- morsanu 5y agoOf course we are trying to promote our business, writing some case studies is one way to do it. But I shared this here not because I thought we will get clients from HN (probably we will be getting some competition instead) but because I thought it's an interesting application of technology that people would enjoy reading about. Maybe we don't see things the same way but even learning about the manual process of counting pearls was interesting for me.
- TuringNYC 5y ago>> Nobody cares that this is just an ad? Seems like a pretty poor ad in that case -- they are advertising a profitable business sub-niche to a huge audience of engineers, many of whom have the knowledge, execution, and money to build a clone service and drive down margins.
- sbierwagen 5y agoI've got bad news for you regarding every other submission on HN.
- joelthelion 5y agoNobody here will buy their app; people are mostly interested in the idea and in the business model.
- kbelder 5y agoI'm planning on sending this link over to our warehouse guys. We sell containers of many small things. And... I could probably build something like this. Not as nice. And not in four hours. It'd take more than four hours of meetings to get it started. The app's price is well worth it, if we can work it into our processes.
- agnosticmantis 5y agoThe tray used in the demonstration is almost white (beige?). Wouldn’t a black tray (hence darker background and higher contrast) increase accuracy?
- mandeepj 5y agoThey could not count by weight (before ML)? For e.g - If 100 pearls weight 10 gm etc? They could also have used a machine for counting them
- bertil 5y agoPearl vary in size a lot; they can easily double in diameter, ie. possibly x 8 in weight. Weighting could be valuable, in addition to counting and measuring how round and shiny they are — but it would be the 4th or 5th more important aspect, at most. Source: my distant family has a pearl farm and I implemented pricing algos.
- lccarrasco 5y agoThe picture in the bottom of the article shows that varying sizes of pearls need to be counted at the same time, making using weight very unreliable. Even if only similar size pearls are allowed, small variations multiplied by a large amount of pearls can cause issues, such as distinguishing 100 pearls of 99 grams each from 99 pearls of 100 grams each.
- meowster 5y agoThey could use a simple sorting machine that sorts pearls based on size (like how most coin sorting machines work - run all coins over a small hole, the smallest coins fall through, then run have a slightly larger hole after that, and so on). Then they could have a simple optical/laser sensor below each hole to count how many smallest, smaller, small, medium, large, larger, and largest pearls fall through each hole. The benefit would then be that if customers wanted pearls of a certain size, they are already sorted. Maybe there is an enterprising user here that reads this, can easily create it, and reaches out to pearl companies.
- kyawzazaw 5y ago$100/mo/dev is deemed profitable to the company si I guess they are happy rather going for contracts for hardware machines
- deleted 5y ago
- Gaessaki 5y agoI think what the CountThings app is doing is great. There are too many industries where tasks are being performed inefficiently due to a lack of applying readily available technology. They had the foresight to develop a product for a very common problem and make a business out of it. I’m a bit surprised that this is making the rounds of HN though. OpenCV and other computer vision libraries have trivialized such counting applications for decades now. ML isn’t really necessary. The watershed algorithm for example, comes built-in and allows segmentation which can then be followed up with blob counting: http://www.cmm.mines-paristech.fr/~beucher/wtshed.html http://www.cmm.mines-paristech.fr/~beucher/wtshed.html I don’t want to diminish OP’s work since the product seems to be well-developed and respond to a real need. I guess the challenge must have been making the app robust enough to support different workloads, lighting conditions, etc. I suppose the novelty factor is seeing to what extent the technology that we as developers and engineers work on every day is often disconnected from practical application.
- pokoleo 5y agoThis article is perfectly within HN's audience! • Clever way to distribute "the future" to a niche/under-served audience • MVP (likely) buildable in a week/weekend • Marketing material demonstrating success • "This could be my passive income side project" appeal to bored tech company engineers It underlines the thesis in some patio11's content: > The future is here, it's just not widely distributed yet.
- varjag 5y agoThe thesis is originally from William Gibson.
- wavefunction 5y agoJust for reference for those unfamiliar, William Gibson said "The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed"
- bobthepanda 5y agoFor a non-tech company, implementing it may be easy but the hard part is getting someone around when it stops working. This saves 3 months for the pearl company, they're not paying someone full time for an implementation of computer vision counting. SaaS allows this cost to be distributed across many clients, making it accessible for businesses that can't afford to keep around a full infrastructure and the engineers required to keep it running.
- damagednoob 5y agoI thought the tray in the thumbnail was the solution. What about a padded tray with dimples in rows of 10?
- gowld 5y agoThis is an advertisement / press release, which is fine, but should be disclosed as such in the HN title.
- rootsudo 5y agoThe website copy is a bit bad, but I can see the application and business use 100%. I just didn't expect to see a website like this today, I guess. It needs more polishing, but that's the power of marketing I guess.
- dudeinjapan 5y agoAs someone who was worked in Japan for 13 years, I can vouch that this is a very strong testimonial. A Japanese company will not adopt new technology like this unless it highly accurate.
- NemuriBaku 5y agoWhen a player rolls 38 6-sided dice in a tabletop game, I'd like to have something similar.
- perl4ever 5y agoI cut 50% of the time needed to manually count small objects by...counting in twos.
- stolsvik 5y agoThis page from countthings.com makes it obvious that counting things isn’t all that trivial: https://countthings.com/en/counting-templates https://countthings.com/en/counting-templates