Robotic Photographer

Boojum137 writes " ExtremeTech has an article on a robotic wedding photographer named Lewis. Lewis's hardware stats are modest, so he uses a clever trick to locate people based on skin tone, which is also independent of race. After locating potential subjects with a myriad of sensors, including sonar, laser range finders, and infra-red, he tries to frame the shot according to photographic rules of composition. But the real innovation behind this "red trashcan" is its ability to fade into the background. According to Lewis's creators at Washington University's Media and Machines lab, because of the robot's passive nature, people tend to ignore it after short period of ogling. This allows for some great natural shots, instead of the typical forced and self-conscious shots from human wedding photographers. And, in case you were wondering, Lewis is going to live up to his name in November."

Comments

you can barely see it

[AssFace]

that thing totally just blends. I could see how people would just not notice a fire engine red barrel wandering through a party.

Sees Skin....

[efatapo]

Does this mean the women with the smallest dresses will be photographed the most?

I think the robot is male

[Aceticon]

Lewis is able to determine that it's seeing a human by recognizing that it's looking at a pair of legs. Once this realization is made, Lewis gazes up to look at the individual's face.

That pretty much describes the way most guys recognize chicks (especially in sunny climates)

Yes...

[Zephy]

it *was* designed by students, after all

As a former wedding photographer,

[BenEnglishAtHome]

I wish the developers of this device luck. They're gonna need it.

Problems? You want problems? We got problems!

1. It's too short. Candid shots from that level, looking up at the subject, are not flattering. And people don't buy wedding photographs that don't flatter them.

2. It's digital, I guess, but in any event uses some kind of video camera to capture images. That's (probably) crap. Still captures from video cameras are of lesser quality than a good digital camera and good digital cameras (that is, "good" by pro photo standards) are as expensive as your house. Weddings are one of the few times in their lives that most people will actually pay good money for high quality photographs. Digital has its place at the low end, but is something as expensive as this is sure to be going to be cost-effective at the low end? I kinda doubt it. Good wedding photography still requires film, preferably nice, wide rolls of it. Show me a machine that can operate a Hassy and we'll talk again.

3. Yes, adult humans tend to ignore something like this after a brief period of familiarization. But there are lots of kids running around at weddings. Ever show a 4 year old the hamster dance page? After 30 seconds, you're bored but they're just getting started. They'll giggle for hours. Same principle here. Just wait till a few unattended kiddos (and there's always at least a couple of kids at every wedding whose parents are nowhere to be found while they tear a path of destruction through the place) notice this thing and decide to play "Let's push over R2D2!" with it. It'll happen.

4. Good wedding photography (Wait - this comment might not be a good one since we've already established that this device is only worthwhile at the low end - but I'll go ahead anyway...) requires making art (sometimes hack art, but art nonetheless) quickly. That requires aesthetic sensibilities and brainpower that this thing just doesn't have.

One last note - I can understand the concept. There are WAY too many wedding photogrpahers in this world with gigantic egos who act like a wedding is a get-together for the purpose of taking pictures. They take over and try to run the whole show. After dealing with them, I can certainly imagine being motivated to invent a machine that would just shut up, do the job, and not get in anyone's way. But that's a by-product of pain-in-the-ass photographers, not really a good reason to develop a new machine. A truly good photographer knows how to be totally unobtrusive 98% of the time. The solution is to not hire bozos. The solution is not to try to replace photographers, even if it's just a few at the low end, with a machine that will necessarily produce substandard output.

Re:As a former wedding photographer,

[MicroBerto]

It always hurts when you're told that you can be replaced with a shell script ;-)

Re:As a former wedding photographer,

[overunderunderdone]

Points 1-3 are engineering problems and solvable. Point 4 is quite valid. Until artificial intelligence is much more human I can't imagine something like this being able to do a good job of this task. Unfortunatly there are MANY very bad photographers doing wedding photography. I've been to weddings where a walking red trashcan would be less obtrusive and would probably take better pictures to boot.

Your final note about getting a GOOD photographer is the real solution. (at least until we are ALL replaced by robots). I had a great photographer at my wedding, totally unobtrusive and a real artist. We also had some friends who where good photographers that we asked to take B&W candid shots. Admittedly as art students we had a lot more knowledge of photographers (and friends with BFA's in photography) but there are good photographers out there. For candid shots, if there is an art school nearby getting a student who is really interested in street photography (probably most of them) to do candids would probably get you some really nice candid shots for very little money (If you want unobtrusive just pick one without too many piercings & maybe pay them extra wear something that *isn't* making a statement ;)

Re:Easy way to get good wedding photos

[Roblimo]

Yep. Good, low-cost, low-tech way to get lots of candid reception shots, works out very well.

Best pattern I've seen = pro to do the ceremony and a *brief* set of posed shots afterwards, disposable cameras for the rest.

The "robot photog" is not going to be a cheap piece of machinery for a long time, and a dozen disposable cameras in friends'/relatives' hands will get more and more interesting photos than a single robot could possibly produce.

Of course, at robot weddings with robot guests, things may be different...

(Don't forget, because of my limo experience I've been to more wedding than most people, literally hundreds of them.)

- Robin

I've seen/played with it...

[Aquaman616]

Lewis was actually rolling around the Emerging Technologies area of SIGGRAPH this year and I got to talk quite a bit with some of the folks that were following him around to make sure he didn't get into any trouble and explain how it worked. (Which is good, because it's just this big red column looking thing and doesn't look particularly friendly)

The photos it "composed" were actually quite good as it would use the rule of thirds when trying to set up a photo. The only real problems I saw with it from a tech standpoint was that the lighting in that area of the convention center was a bit yellow so their white balance was off and the robot had the embarasing habit of totally ignoring anyone with very dark skin. At the time I was talking to a student from a local school who was there who happend to be black and we let the robot take a few pictures of us... when we went to look at the pics every single one of her was cut off as she was basically being ignored as "background".

The other problem were the batteries - I saw them change the batteries on the 'bot once and there were a *LOT* of what appeared to be very heavy lead -based batteries - they looked like motorcycle batteries, but I'm not sure. Apparently the bot lasts for a few hours on a single charge, but then you have to swap out all of its batteries (I think there were at least 5 of them)

kiss the bride

[Scrameustache]

because of the robot's passive nature, people tend to ignore it after short period of ogling. This allows for some great natural shots, instead of the typical forced and self-conscious shots from human wedding photographers.

Yeah, but can it kiss the bride?

Re:This is a good thing

[Tackhead]

> What it does show is that it is feasible to do more work in this area - despite its size, people lose interest (although I would imagine this is more to do with wedding-associated alcohol than anything else...) and let it click away without ogling at it - all it is is fairly simple technology appliying simple rules (e.g. face should be in centre or photo or wherever) and then takes a few pictures.

It's a good thing so many of us geeks are so stereotypically asexual.

I mean, this would be the perfect thing to have at a /.er's wedding. Except that you'd just get roll after roll of close-ups of geeks' noses as they examine the wedcambot for 3 hours while the reception goes on in the background.

Groom included. ("Huh? Oh yeah, yeah, I do, I do, whatever. Just gimme a few minutes, I think I can get a Quake server running on this thing! Tell the best d00d to bring his laptop, we're gonna have wireless LAN gaming at the reception!")

A few more details

[Sangui5]

So I'm a student at Washington University, and I know the people who programmed Lewis. A couple of points:

1. Skin tone: For the most part, the skin tone thing works. Lewis was left roaming around CS happy hour, and he merrirly took pictures of people from India and Africa as well as those from Sweden. He did have problems with one person from India who was *very* dark skinned, but at the time his training data was pictures of Micheal Dixon, the guy who programmed the people recognizer. Micheal is as pale as they get, so that's pretty good. Unfortunately Lewis works much better if the training data is taken under the same lighting conditions as he'll be working on, so if nobody with rather dark skin was available to make training data at SIGGRAPH, it's likely he would have ignored them.
2. People ignoring Lewis: Eventually, even little kids get bored with him. It's cool at first, but the novelty wears off. Besides, little kids would have a hard time pushing him over: he weights a lot.
3. Hardware: Lewis is a commercial robot, and runs on the order of $80,000. Consider a 1 time investment in a robot, or having to pay the salary of a real photographer year after year. At 10%, Lewis's yearly cost is only $8,000. Also, he has a lot of sensors and other features that aren't used when he's in photographer mode. Either way his current hardware wouldn't work for a wedding: Dr. Smart's strictly forbidden putting food or drink on top of Lewis, for good reasons.
4. Kill all humans mode: Lewis has only gone into kill all humans mode twice before, and we've kept the casualties down to an art student and a couple of drunk B-schoolers. Personally, those are acceptable casualty rates. But seriously, a huge quantity of robot research money comes from the DoD. Who really thinks that a robot photographer was what was written on the grant application? Apparently they've already sent 1 robot into caves into Afgahnistan with a payload that included a live weapon. Lewis can navigate around, avoid moving obsticles, and point his camera right at head hight. Now, nobody's applied the technology in Lewis in such a manner yet, but connect the dots.

Anyway, it was a lot more work than you'd imagine to get Lewis to function properly. Lots of things you don't think of crop up (The laser's can't see the legs of a table. Micheal is pale and other people aren't. Wooden doors are approximately skin toned.), and the problem is intrinsically difficult. The skin tone stuff alone eats up most of the processor, nevermind the path planing and mobile obsticle avoidence. For SIGGRAPH he was running on reduced hardware too: he has a dual mobo, but it isn't as reliable as the singe-processor one used at SIGGRAPH.