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Finding Yourself With Photo Recognition
itchyfish writes "You are lost in a foreign city, you don't speak the language and you are late for your meeting. What do you do? Take out your cellphone, photograph the nearest building and press send.
For a small fee, photo recognition software on a remote server works out precisely where you are, and sends back directions that will get you to your destination.
Seems a little far fetched, but amazingly cool if it really works."
The software then looks for useful features, such as the corners of windows and doors, and extracts the colours and intensities of the pixels around them. Next, it searches the image database for matching data, using the base station the cellphone's signal came from as a guide. Finally, it uses the differences between the two images to calculate the photographer's position.
To me, it would appear that an easier solution might be to use GIS data in combination with the cell phone signal and comparisons of rough morphological features of buildings. The instructions should simply be: Point your camera at a building near you so that you can approximate its outline and then send that image. This would scale much larger than the methods referenced in the article as you would not have to store every detail of the buildings surrounding you including pixel maps of textures and color. This approach could be handled for a large city by a few commodity servers whereas the other approach would require significantly more computational resources.
Imagine how difficult it would be to capture details like that in a major city such as NYC? I don't really need directions to find my way around Cambridge city center as you could almost throw a rock from the center and hit just about every building around, but London, Washington, Houston etc... are another story and the data required from their approach would require massive computational infrastructure.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
... a GPSr reading and request information about that location, we get this?
Sounds like a solution in search of a problem.
Some problems that I can see with it. What if your in a flat area with no buildings, landmarks, etc? Or even worse, a very rocky, natural area (say something similar to the grand canyon). And even barring those problems, wouldn't GPS just plain be easier? Take the same concept, have the phone grab its GPS location, have you enter the address you want to go, and both pieces of information are sent and the phone gets its route to get you where you want to go (with associated fee). Seems cool, though.
Every house looks the same where I live
If the photo is taken and the data on the server isn't updated very frequently, couldn't items like cars and other movable objects interfere with the location calculation, as it bases it highly off of the details of the location?
Ideally, the much sought after all in one convergence device (fone/pda/etc.) would have built-in GPS, negating the need for this otherwise functionally sound service.
I wouldn't invest to much into this technology, as I think it'll be obsoleted before it comes to fruition.
-PHiZ
Pretend I said something meaningful or insightful here.
Yeah... but can it help me find my car keys... that's the question.
My favorite phrase: You have 5 Moderator Points! Use 'em or lose 'em!
I can just image the server's cpu goes up to 100% when I send in a photo of McDonald's.
Apparently the accepted method of dealing with being lost in a strange land is to sue that land's govenment for not printing all documentation in your native langauge.
At least, that's what happens here in the U.S.
Is this really necessary? Not everything needs to be so darned tech, you know... maybe we should just get a map and use that.
Where I worked this summer, I had an iPaq with a few software packages installed on it to do GIS tasks. One of the packages was ArcPad from ESRI and the other was StreetMap for ArcPad also from ESRI. When connected to a GPS unit, you could tell ArcPad a destination, and it could either use your current position or one that you entered to calculate driving directions. The accuracy of the maps was amazing, we went out and road tested them (read: drove around with the GPS unit on the truck and compared our path to the roads on the maps) and there was little or no discrepancy between our actual path and the street layer on the PDA. This seems much better than taking a picture of a building that looks like thousands of other buildings in the world. Interesting idea, just not very practial.
... the other way around. If its image database is as large as it would have to be to correctly support this behavior, then I'd like to give it a position and get back a photo so I know what landmarks to look for when I get there, rather than getting lost in the first place.
You are lost in a foreign city, you don't speak the language and you are late for your meeting. What do you do? Take out your cellphone, ...
... get it stolen, and get screwed over the phonebill as well.
what kind of meeting is this, that is hold where you do not know the language, and have no clue to get around, did you parachuted to the meeting but missed the building?
what happened to phrasebooks?
man i'm bitter...
ato
There's a technology, that can take a poorly shot digital photo, and then match it to a database of images of every building in the world, come up with a single match, and then let you know where you are?
Does such a database exist? Could it possibly work without bringing up false positives? I mean, I don't have figures, but there are millions of buildings in any large urban area, and within those millions, they all have multiple sides, and then they all look radically different at different times of day. We're talking storage space that seems like it would be incredibly dificult to manage, let alone search efficiently and return good results from a cell-phone camera image.
Count me as a skeptic.
Finding yourself, also known as college.
Turns out the company owns stock in a number of hard drive manufacturers...
Hopefully this will help preempt the 5000 coming posts of "Why is this better than GPS?"...
1. GPS doesn't work well in cities with tall buildings where sky is obscured by large buildings.
2. GPS has only 10m accuracy. This is important when you're giving pedestrians directions (eg cross the street and enter the second door on your right).
3. Unlike GPS or cell-phone base station approaches, this method gives information specific to the direction the user is facing (eg cross the street and enter the second door on your right).
How about using mapquest before you leave?
-This sig has been discontinued after a sudden realization.
1) get 50 indian graduates
2) buy 50 world atlases
3) buy 50 multimedia phones
4) ?
5) profit
So if they plan to launch something like this on a national scale, how are they going to get pictures of every nook and corner of every town and keep the database up-to-date. Seems like huge investment and effort and I am not sure how much of such data they can buy from govenrment agencies. Plus lot of construction like apartment communities, etc is done on the basis of same model design. It could definitely get a person lost if the building signature happens to be alike. With high volume, the probability of signature matching increases.
Find the nearest native, start talking and gesturing wildly. Point at a map or street sign and say the name of the place you are looking for. They'll figure it out.
Sorry I just don't see this one.
it asks you to make sure that you get the street sign and a building number in the shot
but this locator says i'm in communist russia.
Which comes in handy today as a barrier for foreign corporations like FedEx, who need street addresses to operate.
What if you took a picture of a McDonalds?
Hell, you could be lost for days.
Presumably you first need someone to visit every major city and take photographs of every building... but wait, you need to know the positions that those photographs were taken from, so you need GPS, but if GPS doesn't work because it's sheilded from high buildings...
Obviously a skilled surveyor could work it out, but that transforms this photographing job into a highly skilled position, making it many times more expensive.
If it weren't for that then you could probably pay students 10c a photo.
I'll be sure to use it while I'm wheelin' around on a Segway.
Seriously, this feat is practically impossible. I guess, if you try hard, you can cover a few downtown areas. However the resolution of those little cameras is ridiculously bad. Add variable lighting conditions (day/night, sunrise/noon/sunset), add random camera angle and tilt, and seasonal changes, and local construction, and all you end up with is a fuzzy picture of something.
GPS is the way to do it, and it's free, and it gives you continuous route, with speed and compass indicators as well. I can understand image recognition underground, for example, or indoors - where GPS is not going to work - but outdoors it has no competition.
Gawd only knows what language they speak there, but it sure 'aint English.
I'm calling MAJOR BULL*$^% on this
I took a picture of me in the mirror, the system said that it was my reverse evil twin.
Guys asking for directions...
This honestly seems pretty far-fetched. If you can't take the time to get directions, chances are that you deserve to die. You know, that whole thing of natural selection:-)
You are lost in a foreign city, you don't speak the language and you are late for your meeting. What do you do?
You start thinking about what the hell is this that is so important that you go to a foreign country to have a meeting where people don't understand your language and you bet all your chances on the assumption that your cellphone will find the carrier that will allow you data transfer without a subscription plan. If the meeting is so important in the foreign land, I would think that you would do little more homework than to just depend on a cameraphone!!
Make sure you take a good picture...of the closest street sign.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
I tried to take a photo of my girlfriend's office building near Times Square last year. A doorman ran out and started yelling at me that I wasn't allowed to take photos of the building. He was ready to push my camera down, but a friend convinced me to lower the camera before the doorman got in reach.
---
Another quote from Bush's press conference:
Libya was a nation that ... was dangerous
because of weapons. ... By the way, they
found, I think, 50 tons of mustard gas
- Bush, 13 Apr. 02004
USA is estimated to have fired hundreds of tons of chemically toxic, radioactive depleted uranium ammunitions while at war:
The Bush administration is based on hypocrisy.
>Make sure to speak English very
>slowly too. All foreign people
>actually understand it as
>long as it's spoken slowly.
But don't speak loudly.
When speaking with foreigners, natives tend to raise their voice as if the foreigner had a hearing problem!
Overthinking the problem is usually a good engineering trait, but folks here often overdo it.
I was ranting too much to say it..
This is cool technology, and research into this kind of thing is cool. But it's just not commercial IN THIS FORM.
The best application i can think of is for publishers to be able to find a crappy image using google and then submit it to corbis or any other pro image library and ask for a high quality shot of the same scene... but i'm not that inventive.
If you're meeting with Osama, you'll be right on time.
paintball
>> A doorman ran out and started yelling at me that I wasn't allowed to take photos of the building. He was ready to push my camera down
You should have told him to fuck himself sideways, and kicked him in the nuts if he tried to touch you or your camera.
If you're not on their property, they have exactly zero right to tell you what you can and can't do with your camera!
By the time I total up dinners, movies, gifts, time and emotional distress, this would be *MUCH* cheaper, convenient, and more portable than having a girlfriend willing to stop and ask for directions.
paintball
Taking "intimate" photos and seeing what building you most resemble.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
you're in Paris, Las Vegas? How will they know the difference?
The viability of this has got to be pretty poor:
1) The database would have to be huge -- Not every meeting or event that I attend takes place in the city center.
2) Along the same lines, they need to store every face of these buildings.
3) The image processing better be really good at color correction and noise filtering (weather, blurry photos)
4) Wouldn't people just go buy a map?
5) Wouldn't distortions introduced from a cell-phone lens make the system less accurate?
- rabs
Don't some cell phone's tell you where you are anyway, atleast next to what tower or something. I'm pretty sure a friend of mine in london had a phone that told him what street he was on. Why do they have to make is so complicated.
>>>> A doorman ran out and started yelling at me that I wasn't allowed to take photos of the building. He was ready to push my camera down
>>If you're not on their property, they have exactly zero right to tell you what you can and can't do with your camera!
You're getting confused with the US before 9/11. Now you're a terrorist until you, and everyone you have ever associated with, are investigated innocent.
Then what the heck is the point of having GPS chips in every cellphone?? Oh, for secret government tracking. Right.
why not just triangulate the cell phone signal?....much easier.
How, can a system that doesn't know the difference from your ass and a hole in the ground possibly tell which of the million or so McDonalds restaurants you are at?
... for which we do not yet have an adequate probelm
Mole? 4? Cars?
You could also take a picture of yourself and be told who you are
Havent the CIA been trying to do this (with some success) with Osama Bin Laden and other Terrorists? The terrorists began to cover their backgrounds to try to avoid location detection via these means.
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
I'd rather use the phone to call whoever it is I have a meeting with and ask them how to get there. If they don't speak my language, what'm I doing meeting with them in the first place?
I'm wondering what the alternate uses of this technology might be, because I just can't see this as being a common problem. Could it actually be designed, say, for a missle to target a landmark by sight?
And to think I've been using street signs when I could of just photographed a building.
but how bout a fucking map?
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
Well why worry about that and just use Cell-triangulation which is already used in many applications of this sort in Europe.
Great concept... but its already been solved much better. GPS adds accuracy but costs money to put in the phone (some do have it though). Location based elements are already accessible on Symbian devices and will be accessible on all next gen Java devices via the Location APIs.
This is a pointless solution to a problem that has been solved.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Quite insightful, jea6. The practical application for this technology that the article was predicated upon are silly, and you proved it elegantly: all urban areas have street signs and text recognition is loads easier that the sort of computer vision proof-of-concept being described.
That last bit is what the article is really reporting on--research into intelligent computer vision. The fact that this research is being applied to giving walking directions to stupid humans has far more to do with securing funding than anything else. In other words, if you see people snapping digital photos of office buildings in the near future, you can continue to report them to the Office of Homeland Security.
My other
1) as cited, GPS. Granted, there can be a loss of accuracy by the US, but that is usually no more than what it would take for a weapon to be "reasonably close" to a target.
2) regardless of language barriers, if you know where you are supposed to go, cabbies (or other public transportation) have a pretty good idea of how to get you there.
This looks to be a case of someone having an idea and backing a weak solution into resolving it. Think of it as giving a little boy a hammer...then everything in the world suddenly looks like a nail. Ever juggle fire (torches) in front of kids? The next thing you know, Mom's broom stick disappears. (you can guess the rest)
This is definately cool, and may have some great applications, but may be a bit of overkill for the "lost in a big city" scenario. With available technology, a cell phone company should be able to provide you with a map of the area within a few blocks radius of your location. If this is not enough to get you to your destination, perhaps you don't have much to offer at your important meeting anyway.
SO wait if I send it a picture of my girlfriend it can tell me if im gonna be heading to first base, second base, third base....
You have been sig'd
Helping me find my way to the bathroom at a pub, and the way back to my table.
Q: You are lost in a foreign city, you don't speak the language and you are late for your meeting. What do you do?
A: Do just like all of the other PHBs who were stupid enough to get stuck like that, i.e. screw the meeting, find the nearest bar, and start blowing the company expense account on cheap booze and hookers.
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
woops - drunken aggression got the better of me here - that should've read "best way to work out whether a place is a place where you shouldn't "let your guard down" one year may well be the best place to live the next is to live there.
Thanks and goodnight.
Couldn't they just process images of street signs? Or why not have the person who is lost to SMS the street name(s) they are at (perferrably a corner) and get an SMS back with directions?
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
So what you are telling me, is if I bent over shoved the camera down the back of my trousers, a few seconds later it would tell me I'm in the Christmas Islands? (.cx)
My guess is they have this great photo matching software and made up this ridiculous application as a way to get publicity.
Am I the only one who had a few other uses for the tech pop into their head?
In winter all the leaves fall off and you can see for miles. Then you get snow banks 3-4 feet high. In the summer you get tree's with ton's of green leaves obscuring the view. Next there is spring and fall which are somewhere in between.
Don't forget all the people who decorate their houses during the year too. A nice big Santa cover the front of the window is sure to cause an issue.
I don't think this is a very practical idea for some parts of the world.
This seems like an overly complicated solution. At the moment, my phone in Japan has a feature where I logon to Vodafone's website (from the phone) and click through a couple of links and then it tells me where I am. I assume it gets this information by figuring out which cell the phone is dialing from. From the subsequent menus, there are various options like "find the last train to station X", "find the nearest place to catch a taxi", and so on. A few months ago it was only available in Japanese, but now they've introduced a bilingual version - hoochie mamma.
Why bother using the fancy-dancy image recognition software when cellular telephony has a built-in system that basically acts like a constantly-updated "user location" variable?
(Actually, the answer is simple - to make geeks foam at the mouth. Come on now people!! Excess ain't rebellion.)
--
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill
Could this be abused? Maybe someone cropping a photo of somebody's house in the background of a pic to find where that person lives?
That'll get you the results you're looking for! It's the American Way!
...and within minutes there is a SWAT team all around your party.
*** Turns out your buddy was flagged for a terrorist. ***
darn.
party over.
but, it was a computer mismatch.
great.
and, you got a map of your location.
party on!
You will think "was it such a good idea to go to Nigeria?"
Let me think... This is for the road warrior who frequently gets abducted but still needs to get to his meetings on time?
You're in a foreign country, where the people don't speak your language, and you're late for a meeting with some murderous thugs you've been tasked with removing from the gene pool.
What do you do?
You pull out your night-vision goggles, target a nearby heap of rubble that used to be one of Saddam's "palaces." The goggles lock onto the complex geometric shapes and this information is automatically transmitted to a massive cluster of Cray's in New Jersey on loan from the NSA. Using state of the art satellite x-ray photography and next-generation neural-net AI (NGNNAI), your precise location is calculated and relayed back to you, all at the price of only 3 million dollars an hour. What, you didn't think it was the energizer bunny keeping all those Cray's up an running did you?
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I think this is cool. Although the implementation for humans does not make sense. For Robots to navigate this opens a whole new dimension. What stops you from adding the inside of buildings to the database. Sure GPS is accurate but with this you can be even more accurate. Put the data in a distributed database to solve the workload.
Take your phone, and throw it through the window on the nearest building. A helpful member of the police will arrive shortly to give you directions, possibly starting from the local police station.
has nothing to do with tech at all. You just take a quick look aruond, find the best looking babe and ask for directions. Same goes for the time of day. Ka-ching!
Should we mourn today more because it's the day the Titanic sank or because we pay the IRS through our asses?
And it works best, when you point it at a sign with a street name on it.
Isn't it wonderful, to what great lengths men go, just to avoid asking for directions?
If by amazingly cool you mean "i could care less about cameras on the corner as long as it has some neat technology running sql on the backend that can track me *anywhere* in a major city" then yeah, i guess that's amazingly cool.
Or maybe it's amazingly scary. good god. does the telescreen have to occasionally talk back for you to get worried?
This dot-com bubble already burst in Germany in 1999/2000. There is no need for such service.
There is also no need for cellphones with a built in digicam.
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
Assuming it's not cost prohibitive... Try and see what major landmarks your friends faces match up with! Or see if you can make a model of an area, take a pic of it, and have the computer come back wiith the same area you just modeled... Geo-Modeling competitions... the wave of the future?
Have you bothered to consider why uranium was being used? It punches holes in things other weapons cannot (e.g., tanks, thick stone, etc). And I don't think use of that style relies upon who was chosen via a plurality in the great plutocracy we have running in this country.
To go along with this, the troops who are over there are at risk, regardless of whom sent them over there and regardless of whom brings them back.
Probably the riskiest thing right now is the fact we have "turn the other cheek" policy in force. Have you ever been in a fight where you can only wrestle with someone but you can't hit them back (and into submission) - even moreso when they've got a club or a bat? It's not easy to be semi-tough.
And if you think this is being written by a Bush-loyalist, it's sad you think in such binary terms - you're either pro-Bush and anti-Kerry, or anti-Bush and pro-Kerry; that's so passe it almost fits in with your posting.
If we had a few more like you who had done their country a service by spending a little devoted time, then perhaps you'd understand a bit more of what you're talking about.
Until then, how about a shot at immolation? I'll take up a collection for the gasoline and I'll loan you the the matches.
Here in the UK, try this. Get your cell phone (or mobile as we say here) dial 2580.
Hold the phone up to the radio till it gets disconnected.
Wait.
A text message will arrive with the name of the song.
It costs about 50p. Disclaimer i do not work for or have any involvment in this venture, except friends who built it.
Official GOD FAQ.
You are lost in a foreign city, you don't speak the language and you are late for your meeting. What do you do?
> Go South
You are in a dark alley and a hoodlum throws a knif at you. What do you do?
> Take picture
You are in a dark alley and a hoodlum throws a knif at you. What do you do?
> Send picture
The hoodlum kills you. You are dead. Want to play again?
> Y/n_
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Like in the "good ol' days"?
This message has been ROT-13 encrypted twice for higher security.
Reminds me of when I (from Sweden) was lost in St Petersburg. I thought that I had made pereparations to find the way back to the hotel. But I had the russian word for "subway" writen down on my note instead of the name of the subway station near the hotel.
I eventually found my hotel again.
For a nice date: Call strftime(3C)!
already knows roughly where you are (at least to cell level), and should be able to make it more accirate with triangulations. Seems more promising than taking pictures of all the buildings in a city
no taxation without representation!
Dear All,
Wow! Thank you very much for all your comments on this mobile phone navigation system. I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents worth since I'm one of the people who invented it! Forgive the lack of structure in what follows, but I'm trying to address several different issues raised throughout this discussion...
Yes, another way of doing this is radio signal triangulation (including GPS). But actually, this method doesn't work too well in cities because of things like multipath effects and satellite visibility (BTW our system isn't designed to work outside urban environments). GPS car navigation systems rely on a combination of GPS and inertial sensors, i.e. they take a sort of average of a large number of inaccurate readings to get a good fix on position. But the simpler positioning strategies are unlikely to give good enough acccuracy to establish on which side of the street you are standing (and in any case, they don't tell you whhat direction you're looking in). GPS is also expensive: most people would not be prepared to pay more for a phone with an in-built GPS receiver - but camera phones are already selling well.
No, we're not going to build a database of every building in the world! But a good place to start would be large city centres. FYI what motivated us to invent this system was the familiar problem of getting lost outside London tube stations. Obviously I know which tube station I'm at but I don't usually know which exit I took or what direction I'm facing. Of course I can retrieve a local map via my mobile phone. But the problem is I'm missing that critical "you are here" dot that tells me where to start. This is where our system comes in: by providing the dot (well, an arrow actually because it tells you which direction you're looking in too).
In practice, builing a database is easier than you might think. Probably we could do it with nothing more than a video camera attached to a car. Granted someone will have to drive down the streets of interest but only once (and this shouldn't be too difficult in somewhere like New York).
Finally, no, movable objects don't cause too many problems. The system uses a feature based strategy that is robust to 'clutter' in the form of things like cars, pedestrians, changing shop window displays, etc. That being said, there will always be ways of confusing it, e.g. by demolishing a building. But supposing that picture messages will one day cost as little as text messages do now, a system that works almost instantaneously and gets it right 99% of the time sounds as if it might have some commercial potential at least. And what if the hypothetical tourist isn't lost but just interested? For example, the system could return information about the history of any building of interest in the middle of Venice.
Yours,
Duncan Robertson
My prediction of where mobile technologies are heading, but eventually with real-time assist (I hate to say it, but Terminator style
LOL. The American military is not turning the other cheek. A massacre is occuring in Fallujah, Iraq. Civilians and Arab journalists are being intentionally shot at. Civil servants such as ambulance drivers are fair game. Some reports are saying that few insurgents are being killed but hundreds of regular people are. If you want pictures and first hand accounts of this, check out BBC, Al Jazeera, Reuters and AFP. The American media will never inform you of these atrocities. All of this violence is happening because of some private mercenaries who shouldn't have been over there in the first place.
And if you think this is being written by a Bush-loyalist, it's sad you think in such binary terms - you're either pro-Bush and anti-Kerry, or anti-Bush and pro-Kerry; that's so passe it almost fits in with your posting.
I think in open minded terms. I'm against imperialism in all its forms. Whether it's right-wing oil and Israel protection or liberal UN misadventures and democracy building.
Or summer, or spring, or fall ? Seasons tend to change the environment quite a bit. You need a lot of processing, or 4 different photographs of each season to at least reduce the difference in those.
Ofcourse, if it is raining on the day you take your picture you are left with a lot of noise, etc. etc.
I saw the field of high-level image recognition up close a few years ago. While the particular paper that the person who did the research wrote was about stereographic recognition of (simple) 3D objects, it shows a great deal about the processing power required to correct an occluded part of a scene, or to work under darker or lighter circumstances (p117-). I expect that in a 2D recognition the same problems rear their ugly head and make things a whole lot harder.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Have you every used GPS? Portable GPS units cut out in cities. Furthermore, they can't tell you the direction you are pointing, so you usually have to start going before they say "oops, you have to go the other direction". And those problems aren't easily fixable.
Vision-based navigation has been used with mobile robots for a long time. In that case, the mobile robot takes pictures of its environment and determines where it is and where it's going based on that. It's useful because GPS doesn't work in many environments and because GPS only gives you location, not spatial orientation (only direction of motion).
A lot of these "traditional" AI problems have gone that way: you can capture images with your phone and send them to a server to be recognized, you can capture speech with your phone and send it to a server to be recognized, etc. People have talked about this kind of visual navigation application for a while, but these guys seem to be the first to present a working system.
That is, problems of the form "capturing image/sound/video, processing it on a computer, and displaying results" are transformed into into "capturing image/sound/video on a cell phone, sending it to a server, processing it on the server, and sending the results back to the cell phone". Let's hope we aren't going to get a flood of trivial patents out of this.
hm .. thinking about the development during last 5 years ...
i believe that in another 5 years, i will only need to call a special, toll free, number and THEY will tell me where i am, where do i go, and what i think
I know of a program for the Symbian platform that can find out your location using the Cells to wich your phone connects and change the phone settings according to profiles you`ve set. That way you can, for example, synchronise a folder on your Smartphone with your work PC via bluetooth and so on. So, I guess that the system in question isn`t, actually, that usefull since Cell-based recognition is allready used and with good results. I dunno about precision though... ;-)
Is not easier to locate you entirely by your phone signal? in a city, probably within seconds they can tell you exactly where you are, no need of cool-as-hell but expensive technology.
DON'T PANIC
CCTV cameras all over the city capture images for face recognition, if you get lost...take your own photo and send it. The server compares the image to those in the face recognition database, and returns the where the most recent match was taken.
Ha!! I tricked you, it isn't a better way at all!!
Like they've got a toy version of the system working for a restricted set of locations in a brightly lit and clean environ using relatively hi-rez pictures.
But it's going to scale up very badly because this is a horribly difficult problem, even for people, who've got brains heavily optimized for recognizing visual images. I lived in Boston for 12 years, and if you showed me a picture of a random house on a street, I sure as hell couldn't tell you where it was, even from a 2 megabyte jpg on a sunny day. Now consider doing it through a grainy cell phone camera in arbitrary lighting conditions for any city in the world?
Ferget it.
They are just looking to build up some VC funding, like so many other flaky tech startups. My guess is that they've got a runaway delusional complex about the practicalities of implementing this.
Or maybe they're banking on the development of quantum computing before they have to go to market?
From the article:
> However, the system's commercial future is uncertain.
> "The question is: how much are people prepared to pay
> for it, and how often will they use it?" says Rob Morland,
> of technology consultants Scientific Generics near Cambridge.
> "That's a tough one."
I've posted earlier on this...
The solution could be to use cell phones + cameras + GPS to effectively do collaborative cartography. i.e. units could be both consumers and producers of information - both raw picture data and processed maps - like much of the internet today.
A person could take pictures or video, each frame having a GPS timespace-stamp, and load it onto his computer at home, which could then participate with thousands of other computers in feature extraction using freely available mapping sources like TIGER data. Annotations to mapping information could include: GPS timespace stamps, voice or text annotation, accelerometer data (for data on observer orientation and acceleration). The latter could also help improve feature extraction from multiple images in a video (for eg: Intel OpenCV vision library uses stereo cameras for feature detection).
Throw in concepts like local P2P exchanges by mobile units (for eg: my PDA has GPS, your cellphone has a camera & GPRS, both can communicate over bluetooth --> potential for a win-win situation for us both), distributed image storage and feature extraction, novel types of feature recognition (eg: ATM screens, McDonald outlets), multiple freenet-like distributed cartography servers --- the concept can get quit interesting. - for users, also potentially for cartography vendors even though they will have to improve their value proposition.
maybe I'm just plain stupid here but why not triangulate your position with gsm-transmitters to get your postion?
I'm an american, so the only places on this earth where they don't speak my language and there's business to be done are Boston and inner-Russia.
And in Soviet Russia, your "partners" find you.
(Which is arguably a good thing, as not even this tech could possibly tell all the damnable Soviet appartment buildings apart)
I'm not sure if this is funny or insightfull.
And that's not funny.
In the new generation of G3 phones GPS is going to become common. There's already versions on the marked with GPS:
o rola-a835-3G.htm
"The Motorola A835 is the first 3 phone to make use of A-GPS (Assisted Global Positioning System) which combines GPS satellite information with Network information to provide incredibly accurate location details." from http://www.mobile-phones-review.co.uk/Three-G/Mot
Whats a sig? And how do i append it?
Why bother?
Wherever you go, there you are!
This is the same joke as this one ... why the heck are both of them +5, Funny ??
I have to say that I wouldn't sign up for this service.. I might whip my GPS out if I was lost in the hills or the highway, but I think I'm far more likely to have done a little preparation for my trip by buying a pocket map and making use of the Universal Method of asking someone for directions when you don't speak the language i.e. politely nab someone, point at the map and let them point figure it out.
. . . look at a street sign.
First off, you don't always have access to a map and even if you do you might not speak the language the map is in. The more options you have the better.
Location. That is what this service is REALLY about. Forget directions - there are easier ways to get them. Figuring out where you are and being able to tell a computer, thats useful.
I think there will be MUCH better way of figuring out where you are then taking photos (rfid tags come to mind) but it is a method that could turn out to be great or suck eggs. Who knows. Who cares? People trying is how we will find out what works and what doesn't.
Also, how can the more data about a city be anything but good?
What do you say to the man that has nothing? Cast it away!!
...but rather MMS (multi-media messaging) which is standard on all camera phones (in Europe at least) and works automatically out of the box (excepting problems with inter-network transmission which will undoubtedly soon be solved.) Before-you-nitpick note: MMS may work using GPRS as a transport, I'm not sure, but my point is that it is preconfigured, like SMS, on at least European mobiles.
To get your position to within a few hundred feet you'd need to know the exact parameterization of the lens, the zoom, the angle of the camera... unlikely.
You point it at the building in front of you. It tells you "you are looking at building X, now turn to your right and..." This is close enough to be useful without a map being necessary.
Enhancement request! In the super wal-mart are a zillion cameras. Take a look some time. Fix this thing up so it will send directions on how to find my wife in the place and we will have something!
This is far better than existing systems can manage. GPS satellite positioning is accurate to 10 metres at best...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought GPS units were now much more accurate than that, to the tune of within a few centimetres...
"You are lost in a foreign city, you don't speak the language and you are late for your meeting. What do you do? "
You go into the nearest hotel and ask the nice English-speaking person behind the reception desk.
Even on Mars the hotel receptionists speak perfectly-accented English.
erroneous: look me up in a dictionary
n/t
You are lost in a foreign city, you don't speak the language and you are late for your meeting. What do you do?
Well gee, last time that happened I just called "Q" and had me use one of his high-tech gadgets to rendezvous with another MI6 agent. Failing that, I would just seduce the nearest hot chick.
Seriously though, unless you are 007 (or Austin Powers possibly), who finds themselves in this situation? I suppose if you are an international sales exec this might be helpful, but how many of those are there in the world? Seems like a device that's not very useful to the everyday-joe.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Can this service take a picture of my new japanese cell phone and tell me how the hell I'm supposed to take and send pictures with it?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I've got some great face recognition software for you!!
A new face on an old technology. Remember carrying a map, and finding the name of a nearby street on it?
Or I could just get a handheld GPS,
And it could Map out where i wanted to go....
But thats just me... and I do not like to pay for services...
Last time I was in Tokyo I was outside Starbucks but had no idea where I was. The photo recognition thing came back with its "recomendations". Unfortunately two were in Seattle and one in London.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
This is just silly and way over the top. Ever heard of a map? Or if you haven't got a map, you can stop another person and ask them. Duh, surely even the geekiest of geeks still knows how to ask another person for directions? And frankly, the "technology" involved in speaking to and understanding another person is way cooler than anything we've yet invented. By comparison this photo idea is decidedly lame.
Come see the distortion inherent in the system! Help! Help! I'm being refracted!
That just about describes the typical American tourist.
"The last thing I want to do is deal with a bunch of people who want something."
Major Major
1. GPS. Whether or not the government can, or would, degrade a GPS network at its own whim, generally speaking, one assumes it will be running as we would expect, all bar WWIII breaks out. Whilst their is never a shortage of cash for projects like this (Photo recognition positioning software), fact is GPS is a technology that is on a day to day basis, more accurate, and cheaper to implement and use. (IE, cost of imaging all major cities/towns. How long will it take in the first place to create that database.) It wont be long before mobile phones have GPS recievers in them, along with any other need gadget.
2. Triangular positioning. It's been in various media articles, the concept of parents being able to use this technology provided by the mobile phone company, to keep track of thier child, using 3 towers to calculate the position of the phone. Wouldn't be hard to implement a service where by which you dial that number, and you are provided with immediate locations.
The point is, as cool as the idea is, practically speaking, it's a very long way of solving a problem, that's allready solved!
That's why ESA (that is, Europe) is developing Galileo, which is a civilian GPS system (also a constellation of satellites).
~ 1 year ago I attended an IBM conference that had something very simliar (I didnt read this article) It was a palm pilot with a digital camera - you take a picture of a sign, for example, and it would translate it. The individual did not demonstrate this, but it seemed real cool (if it worked) What's more is, he did not make any mention of a remote server...(?)
Yep, that enormous "lost businessman in a foreign city with a camera cell phone" market has been screaming for something like this for years!
... "Christ ... I'm in Ashgabat? I thought I was in Montreal!!! Guess that airline pilot really screwed up!"
I can see it now
This is about the stupidest solution to an absolute non-problem I've seen in months.
If you so retarded that you can't "geo-locate" yourself with a damn $2 map you can get almost anywhere, just let evolution run it's course I say.
Wouldn't a GPS-equipped cell phone make much more sense?
Proverbs 21:19
Yet another feature in search of an appication. It's a phone - talk on it.
Translation:
Yipeee! We've got this REALLY COOL technology.
The only trouble is, we don't know if its usefull or not.
But, its STILL REALLY COOL!!!
I read
Little boxes on the hillside,
and they're all made out of ticky-tacky.
Little boxes on the hillside,
and they all look just the same.
-Malvina Reynolds.
I am officially gone from
"You are lost in a foreign city, you don't speak the language and you are late for your meeting. What do you do?"
I would have taken a cab to the meeting in the first place.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Just think of how much embarrasment and shame you could save.. lost in the city, can't find which building you're supposed to bomb.. alas, there's a service that'll guide you to your target!
The road between democracy and tyranny is paved with secrecy in the name of security.
Does this mean people will stop comming up to me and asking where Marble Gate and Lei-chester Square are? Although complex visual recognition instead of phone triangulation does seem abit like blowing a blind old man up with 3 helicopter-gunships.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Save all the time and money, hire a guy (or gal) who knows said city, have them sit at a phone line, and let people call him (or her) asking for directions. Op: Can you tell me the street you are on? Tourist: Michigan Ave. Op: Number of the nearest building? Tourist: 115 Op: Where are you going? Tourist specifies a location Op puts the two numbers into mapquest. Op: Your destination is 5 miles away. 2 miles north, 3 miles east. Op: That will be $3 please.
Just point your camera at the nearest government building, bridge or other terrorist target, and after the police has shown up and searched you for paper knives and other terrorist equipment, ask them "by the way, which way is the airport?" or whatever you need to know.
You are assumed to have a cell phone. Phone's location can be triangulated with a precision of up to a meter or so.
Cell company providing this information back to the owner of the phone _most likely_ will not break any privacy laws of whatever the country is, so it should be rather trivial for them to provide the service if there's a demand. They already geo-position 911 calls, so the technology is there.
3.243F6A8885A308D313
Try O2, but other companies may offer similar coverage.
With O2 I have been in Italy, Germany and Spain and my humble "pay as you go" service (or whatever it is called for this company) works with no problems.
And do not be lazy, learn a few sentences of each language or buy trevelguides for each country (which normally include basic sentences).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Is it really necessary to point out that it would require an absurd amount of work to acquire the initial data for every possible location in every major city, not to mention keeping it updated? Versus the extreme simplicity and low cost of GPS locating? This is just an academics' plaything.
In any case, I'm generally where I need to be at any particular time. That might not be where I want to be at that time, but that's just a divergence between my expectations & the realities of life, and my serenity is, for the most part, inversely proportional to my expectations.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
I'm lost in a city--what do I do? I walk into the nearest convenience store (if in an English-speaking nation) or hotel (in other countries) and ask the nice clerk where I am, and how to get where I want to go.
If I have my cell phone, I can call a cab. (They also have these neat devices called 'phone booths' in some places.) I can read the address off the building next to me.
If I want a map, services like Mapquest can provide me with one--I can access it through a web-enabled phone. Again, this requires me to key in the address that's on the front of the building next to me.
True, this doesn't directly provide orientation information, but I can always ask someone which way is north--or walk one block and compare with my Mapquest map to find out which way I went. (Assuming I can't tell from the sun/stars due to cloud cover/smog.)
None of these methods is vulnerable to GPS degradation, either. Incidentally, why would a lost tourist need better than ten meter--or even hundred meter--precision? Particularly if they're on one of the major routes that is likely to be mapped by this group.
Really, this is a solution looking for a problem.
~Idarubicin
See how well this service works when you send it a picture of a cookie cutter starbucks storefront
steal this sig
Accuracy can be degraded with a single GPS. Differential GPS has one stationary receiver with a known position. It monitors the error of the GPS signal and transmits the error to other receivers in the vicinity. Consequently even DoD's Selective Availability Error can be overcome. Read more here.
... which has to be good only if you're near a landmark or something. The article downplays the magnitude of the recognition problem signigicantly.
So it would be way more efficient to put in a little differential GPS receiver than to try and do some of the image processing suggested in the article
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
"They've canceled the show but we're still here. What does that make us?" "Big Damn Junkies, Sir!" "Ain't we just"
We have analyzed your surroundings from the picture you sent and have determined that you are in a movie theater. Please be patient and authorities will be there shortly to "assist" you. :)
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
...if I point my camera at a beautiful woman does it tell me how to get to her house?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
" k w i k s - a h - t i k"
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Why take a picture and rely on some wishy washy software when a GPS cell phone would work MUCH better and much quicker... in fact... a GPS phone whould show you the map instantly without the need to stand around thumb up bum waiting for a return... how long before the rocket surgeons launch a GPS phone? shouldn't be long if it already hasn't happened...
I've heard/read (sorry, forgot where) that upwards of 90% of new residential developments in the US are built based on recycled blueprints. Since developers buy in bulk, they're made out of the same material, and since nobody has any taste or originality left anymore, they're all painted either light blue or peach. Living in Canada, it looks to be pretty much the same up here too.
In the great CONS chain of life, you can either be the CAR or be in the CDR.
...and the only directions it would send back said "You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here."
This will render that cool image retrieval system in Minority Report obsolete!
Wouldn't it be easier to take a photo of the nearest street sign?
Long live the Speaker Bracelet
Rolo D. Monkey
It would make for interesting sight-seeing opportunities, of course, but perhaps not when being later for a conference or some such.
The liver is evil and must be punished.