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Show HN: Using YOLO to Detect Office Chairs in 40M Hotel Photos
I used the YOLO object detection library from Ultralytics to scan over 40 million hotel photos and identify images with office chairs. This helped me create a map showing hotels suitable for remote work.
Map: https://www.tripoffice.com/maps https://www.tripoffice.com/maps
Yolo: https://www.ultralytics.com/yolo https://www.ultralytics.com/yolo
The whole process was done on a home Mac without the use of any LLMs. It's based on traditional object detection technology.
- maalber 2y agoInteresting idea and execution! So basically you wanted to find hotels where the rooms have office chairs and a desk? Or just in any of the images, e.g., a lobby? Side note; I love how YOLO, a deep learning based model, is now being referred to as traditional object detection. Template matching gang rise up.
- nomad86 2y agoIn our hotel photo database, we have everything: rooms, lobbies, bathrooms, pools, exterior shots of buildings, etc. I trained an AI to recognize ergonomic chairs, but sometimes there were errors. For example, a chair in a hotel's SPA was always identified as an ergonomic chair. That's why we manually reviewed all 50k photos to verify them.
- arnolmido 2y ago50k manually? How long did it take you?
- nomad86 2y agoI don't know, I assigned this task to trusted specialists from India.
- maalber 2y agoWow, manually reviewing 50k photos is a lot! Would you be willing to share what the cost of that was?
- nomad86 2y agoI created an app similar to Tinder that facilitates manual verification. Around 60 photos can be verified in one minute. The whole process took about a week and didn't cost much.
- BobbyTables2 2y agoSounds like YOLO verified the work of the specialists too! (;->
- karamanolev 2y agoDoesn't sound that much. When I was playing with datasets, for simple tasks I only took around 3 seconds to classify an image. That's 1200/hour or on the order of 40 hours of work. That can't cost much when outsourced.
- moralestapia 2y agoRLHF in the wild, nice.
- dylan604 2y ago> I trained an AI, but sometimes there were errors. I edited that down to a proper summary of AI in general
- ec109685 2y agoThis desk is pretty useless, despite having an office chair: https://www.tripoffice.com/nigeria/lekki-ng/souz-suites-apartments https://www.tripoffice.com/nigeria/lekki-ng/souz-suites-apar...
- dylan604 2y ago> Or just in any of the images I just looked at hotels I'm familiar with, and images with highlighted chairs were not limited to the guest rooms. Some are definitely from shared spaces at the hotel.
- ungreased0675 2y agoDo you have any insights on which hotel brands have the best chairs? Is furniture standardized across brands?
- nomad86 2y agoI haven't checked it, but such data should be easy to get from our database.
- jll29 2y agoIMHO There is a huge gap for affordable hotels for normadic workers and business people. Hotel rooms suck when you need to use them for work. Typically there are massive beds and I travel alone if for work. There is no proper chair, no writing table at all or one too small, and the sockets tend to be in the wrong corner of the room. If I was an entrepreneur outside of software looking for a gap, I might have invented a hotel chain for work stays. But I'm not, so here is the idea for you to get rich with it (so I can stay there one day). I like the OP's idea of using ML models to gather intelligence from hotel photos. For years I took a photo of nearly every hotel room with my laptop on the desk so that I could go back and re-book the rooms that were suitable if there was a conference in the same city again in the future.
- Scoundreller 2y agoOnce I specifically booked an airbnb because they promoted their 17" LCD with hdmi, usb-c and dvi inputs. I'm like, why don't more offer this?
- CobrastanJorji 2y agoI think the answer is the first word in your sentence. How many times have you stayed at a hotel? Now how many times have you stayed at a hotel because they promoted a good work space? Both cost about the same to run, and one has a much greater need.
- notahacker 2y agoPlus people that do like to spend much of the year travelling around doing deep work are (i) relatively likely to book short stay apartments instead of hotels and (ii) relatively unlikely to be particularly fussy about working environments since they're actively choosing travel over convenience and optimal working environments
- ghaff 2y agoIf I think I just can't work without multiple monitors and a high-end office chair (and maybe printer), I probably won't travel or I'll get a co-working space of some sort. When I traveled a lot for work, it was some combination of the event/trip was my working and/or I just worked on my laptop wherever. I'm semi-retired now but I'm temporarily staying in a Marriott property (Springhill Suites) that does have a usable desk and office chair which is just fine for writing at for me--though people with very specific requirements probably wouldn't like it.
- _august 2y agoNice idea! What did you use for your hotel dataset source? I've been wanting to work on travel based app idea with hotel integration, but seems like most providers (like booking.com) lock down their data.
- dylan604 2y ago> What did you use for your hotel dataset source Do you hear that noise? It sounds like something is scraping
- _august 2y agoperhaps, but they build out a full booking flow that doesn't take you off-site: https://www.tripoffice.com/united-states/new-york-city-new-york-us/residence-inn-new-york-downtown-manhattan-financial-district https://www.tripoffice.com/united-states/new-york-city-new-y...
- nomad86 2y agoThis is not scraping. Many hotel sites share photos with their partners, we work with Lexyl (HotelPlanner).
- splonk 2y agoYou can sign up as an affiliate with both Booking and Expedia to get API access to their data. It's meant for people who are going to run their own hotel booking sites with Booking/Expedia content, so it's not quite as trivial as a random free signup, but it shouldn't be too hard to do for a real business. OP's site appears to be affiliated with Lexyl, which owns some other hotel booking sites, so I assume they already have this access. That said, I would consider scraping, even with API access. In some ways the API access is both limited and binds you to their terms of service, and depending on the legalities in your jurisdiction, scraping could be more effective.
- stevesearer 2y agoThis is really interesting. I’ve been looking for a way to automate the next step in this process after you know which photos have chairs: knowing the model and manufacturer of each chair. Unfortunately training a model suitable for the long tail of possibilities is beyond me.
- a2800276 2y agoOk, I'll bite: why have you been looking for ways to identify the make and model of hotel chairs?
- stevesearer 2y agoI run officesnapshots.com and we currently identify visible products manually (not just office chairs). This allows us to show our readers which specific products are in the photo they are looking at which is a service we offer to the manufacturers. It is advertising, but like hyper-specific and relevant to the photo you’re looking at.
- windows2020 2y agoThis is like an automated version of 'Commercially Available Chairs in Star Trek' but for hotels. https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/database/chairs-trek.htm https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/database/chairs-trek.htm
- zeristor 2y agoThis will come in handy to be able to perform the Riker manoeuvre: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lVIGhYMwRgs https://youtube.com/watch?v=lVIGhYMwRgs
- ggm 2y agoHow did you go with duplicate detection? (For context, aside from being amazingly generally useful to anyone with non trivially edited images, lots of hotel chains reuse content)
- cenamus 2y agoPerceptual hashes are very good for that, maybe with some adjustments for mirrored images and some crops
- ggm 2y agoYes. Most of the systems I used a couple of years ago (immich for instance) were still quite immature.
- punnerud 2y agoCan use dhash that is more robusts to compression, crops and color changes. Mainly look at the features in the image.
- mkl 2y agoThe README explicitly says it's not good for crops, and from the algorithm description it can't be. Or is there another thing called dhash with a different algorithm? https://github.com/benhoyt/dhash https://github.com/benhoyt/dhash. https://github.com/Rayraegah/dhash https://github.com/Rayraegah/dhash is similar but horizontal only.
- anticensor 2y agoAnother use of YOLO, beating CAPTCHA puzzles: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.08831 https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.08831
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- MaheshNat 2y agoHow much did you end up spending?
- mkl 2y agoThey did it on their own computer. https://github.com/ultralytics/ultralytics https://github.com/ultralytics/ultralytics
- MaheshNat 2y agoWhy stop at just office chairs? Why not detect all categorizable objects in every photo and rank based on that? Could also crop just the object detection regions of each image, run those cropped images through CLIP/SigLIP, then UMAP and HDBSCAN to view a 2 or 3 dimensional latent space clustering of office chair types.. might reveal some info as to what kinds of chairs exist in what geographical regions. Could use a VLM to auto-tag each cluster given a couple images from each one. Could run PCA on the CLIP embeddings and have some sliders for each principal component.. maybe the first is chair color or size or whatever much data = much fun
- nomad86 2y agoI tried to detect models of specific chairs, but it's very difficult. To train the AI model, you need many photos of the same type of chair, and on the internet, you can usually find only one stock photo of each chair.
- pinoy420 2y agoMake synthetic dataset with reposing
- myself248 2y agoThere's an Internet Movie Car Database, and independently, an Internet Movie Firearms Database. Surely there are more. I feel like they should be one database with object_type=car and object_type=firearm respectively. And then I can finally search by object_type=vacuum_cleaner and find out the wild-looking ball-shaped vacuum in that sci-fi movie whose name escapes me...
- NikkiA 2y agoThe classic orange 60s hoover ball? https://d3j17a2r8lnfte.cloudfront.net/mvh/2024/3/medium/bzSoUDvubVNwQbRS3hdznjcA.jpeg https://d3j17a2r8lnfte.cloudfront.net/mvh/2024/3/medium/bzSo... My grandparents had one in the 70s, it always amazed me.
- drewbitt 2y agoSome hotels I clicked on are being recognized for their 'business centers', that one crappy little room with two ancient desktops and a printer.
- Tepix 2y agoEven shared workspaces often get this wrong. On their pictures i see desks with crappy chairs and no big monitors to connect my laptop to. Bizarre.
- instagraham 2y agoI have no programming expertise but I'm looking for ideas that use YOLO to detect stuff like this. I was thinking of a way of automatically tagging and collecting data from my daily commute dashcam/GoPro footage - number of EVs, demographics of traffic, etc. I want this to be a project that teaches me the ropes but since I need instant gratification, I'd like if the result also offered value to others. The one thing I want to avoid is cleaning up data, since spreadsheets give me the ick.
- IanCal 2y agoHave a look into Sam, groundingdino, groundedsam https://github.com/IDEA-Research/Grounded-Segment-Anything https://github.com/IDEA-Research/Grounded-Segment-Anything You can use that to take images and generate annotated segmented images/masks that you can then train a YOLO model on. I've done this for prototypes before and it's a very quick way of getting started as you can hand off the really annoying annotation work to a machine.
- a2800276 2y agoHow happy are you with the results?The execution is great, but I feel the idea didn't really validate well. Every single sample ended up with pictures like this: (https://hotel.trvcdn.com/380/de/800024805/700034633/nh-collection-koln-mediapark-3.webp https://hotel.trvcdn.com/380/de/800024805/700034633/nh-colle...). While I'm impressed at how accurately you can detect chairs with wheels, that doesn't seem to be an indicator of an ergonomic workspace. Quite frankly, I would have preferred (and been fine with) sitting on the bed with my laptop in every hotel I clicked on.
- dchuk 2y agoI travel extensively for work. Where are you guys staying that doesn’t have a basic desk and chair with outlets and stuff ready to go? Even the most basic Marriott property has a totally comfortable workspace in every room
- tobi_bsf 2y agoI travel extensively for work, and in Europe this is a real Problem. I stayed in Steigenberger Hotels in a "Business Suite" that does not had a chair and a desk. Marriot properties like moxy for instance are guaranteed to have no desk in the room.
- OfCounsel 2y agoI stayed at the Hyatt Centric in Boston. Take a look at the photos - no desk or chair. Moxy (Marriott) hotels tend not to have desks either.
- camhart 2y agoDid you do anything to retrain the model, or just use it out of the box?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nomad86 2y agoWe manually labeled almost 1,000 chairs in various photos to train the model.
- pknerd 2y agoI wonder how good Gpt and Claude could do it. What would be the computational cost difference?
- nomad86 2y agoAt first I wanted to use Google's Vertex AI for this purpose, but the costs were too high. Besides, in this case, we would also have to upload 40 million photos to the cloud for Google to evaluate what’s on them. YOLO is the best for such tasks; it works locally and is really fast.
- tobi_bsf 2y agoYou should remove pictures that contain multiple office chairs, i saw a lot of pictures that got properties marked as postive beeing their business centers or conference rooms.
- bemmu 2y agoWhat I'm most curious about is how does one get 40 million hotel photos? Is this offered through some Booking.com API etc.?
- teruakohatu 2y agoI was also wondering this. The hardest part about this would be scraping 40m photos.
- nomad86 2y agoAll major booking sites share hotel photos with their partners. We are in several partner programs, but now we mainly work with HotelPlanner.
- diimdeep 2y agoWithout at least some technical details and insights from process of doing so this is just ad for your website. And it does not even work in country with 146 million people, but author is from "democratic" european country so not surprising.
- nejsjsjsbsb 2y agoYou posted this in 2023 too. Thought it sounded familiar!
- mkl 2y agoAll 8 of their submissions are versions of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nomad86 https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nomad86
- bambax 2y agoThis is pretty cool; however this account has been repeatedly posting this same story since 2023 and never anything else... weird https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nomad86 https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nomad86
- bemmu 2y agoWell, it's been a while since it was last posted, so seems fine. Interesting how it only caught on once it triggered some techy interest. I can understand why. My thought pattern was also like "oh YOLO, I know that, interesting to see some application for it, oh cool idea, upvote".
- franga2000 2y agoFrom a few minutes of clicking around, most of these "office chairs" look entirely unsuitable for longer periods of work. I've also never seen a hotel room without at least a basic "school chair" and those are far more comfortable than a lot of the plastic slab or designer clamshell things I see in these photos.
- ncruces 2y agoI've checked locally. Most of these aren't really hotels, but short term rentals. I don't have an huge issue with short term rentals per si. They are an important niche for tourism when you take the whole family, whereas most (esp. city) hotels are not really appropriate for a family of 4 or 5. OTOH, (esp. city) hotels are usually fine for the business trips they were designed to cater too. This leaves us with “digital nomads.” Helping these find ways to put additional pressure on the housing market through short term rentals will only cause locals to get politicians to further restrict them.
- echelon_musk 2y agoI would like to do a variation on this theme where instead I scan pub photos for pool tables and create an index in London. It can be hard to find a pub with a pool table these days!
- ghaff 2y agoHeh. Other than a place in SF that had a bunch of pool tables near the Moscone, haven't seen one in a bar in ages. There used to be one in the bar that we hung out at in my grad school.
- vergessenmir 2y agoHow do you get access to 40M Hotel Photos?
- mcculley 2y agoThis is a great idea. What I have found worse in hotel rooms is not the chair, it is that the desk is at a stupid height relative to the chair. I use a standing desk at home and would love an easy way to use a standing desk at a hotel without carting around a tripod.
- KrustyTheDev 2y ago[flagged]
- thenthenthen 2y agoWhat can YOLO detect actually? I am interested in satellite imagery, what are the options in this field? Disclaimer: i am working for myself, i have no money, a 15 year old laptop and obsessions
- aduffy 2y agoYOLO is a pretty simple and flexible architecture. Like most of these models, you can label some data and just freeze the intermediate layers and just retrain the final predictor head. Checkout as well darknet, which runs at really high fps on super cheap hardware
- javiercr 2y agoAwesome! How long did it take to run locally on your Mac? Any details you can share about the stack used for processing (other than YOLO for detection)?
- nomad86 2y agoThx! Downloading all the photos took the most time. Object detection process took only several days. At TripOffice, we use simple and widely-used tools: Python, NextJS, and MySQL.
- lispforlife 2y ago[dead]
- tminima 2y agoHey, cool idea. Would you be able to tell me the tech stack for the whole app? I want to build a similar application for some other use case. I have built a static map with all my labels using leaflet in Python. To turn it into something like you have, what technologies will I need?
- nomad86 2y agoThx, see here: https://docs.mapbox.com/mapbox-gl-js/example/cluster/ https://docs.mapbox.com/mapbox-gl-js/example/cluster/ I use MapBox, but similar things can also be done on Google Maps.
- idoescompooters 2y agoUnfortunately digital nomads aren't going to be staying in hotels. Maximum 30 days, plus terrible internet. https://thewirednomad.com https://thewirednomad.com is better suited because they are all non-hotels and have verified internet speeds. Previously posted on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37176439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37176439
- Suppafly 2y agoThere is a project that helps the government identify locations in child sex abuse photos, I wonder if a project like this could help.