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Counting 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 bee

Counting 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 ago
If you think old, unoptimized, high-human labor business processes exist only in Japan, have I got a bridge to sell to you.
- jopsen 5y ago
  Optimizing 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 ago
    That 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 ago
      It does mentions three months reduction of labour cost, which is a lot more than 80 hours.
innocenat 5y ago
People 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 ago
  Are there any alternatives? Or how one should approach making an app from scratch?
  - dpwm 5y ago
    The 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 ago
      My 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 ago
        We 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

krapht 5y ago

If you think old, unoptimized, high-human labor business processes exist only in Japan, have I got a bridge to sell to you.

jopsen 5y ago
Optimizing 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 ago
  That 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 ago
    It does mentions three months reduction of labour cost, which is a lot more than 80 hours.

innocenat 5y ago

People 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 ago
Are there any alternatives? Or how one should approach making an app from scratch?
- dpwm 5y ago
  The 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 ago
    My 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 ago
      We 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