Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
Gotta remember one thing; Civilians aren't in control of GPS. GPS's accuracy can be degraded at any time on the US Military's whim. Same with any of the other networks that are currently being built by different government agencies. IF there were a Civilian GPS, then this would /almost/ always be a solution. But what if there's a solar flare? What if there's some other feature about the region blocking satelite traffic, but not wireless traffic (bad weather maybe?)?
I believe this could actually be really cool if we get it to work, especially in an urban environment, but not so much out in the desert or anywhere; it's not meant for that. Instead, it's for finding that office building in Portugal when you're about to be late for a business appointment, and yet you've never been to Portugal before.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
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.
Once again, as we saw in 2002, GPS quality can be degraded at any moment, even taken wholly offline. Not to mention the "Act of God" possibilities to knock it offline *metorites, solar flares, etc etc*.
Meanwhile, investing in this technology gives us a reason to improve image detection and image processing. It gives us a reason to build the technologies needed to digitially map our world, which could be useful for anything and everything, including finding the best way out of a highrise during a fire, or even police task forces on drug busts... there's really no end to what a Digital Map can do, that GPS just will never have the capability of doing.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
But if we build a new global network where each phone has exactly the same hardware... then why not build our own GPS-like network instead.
The system being open-source is also not a big deal. Sure it'd be nice to have an OS library which could find similar images of buildings but the real value would be in the dataset which almost certainly wouldn't be free.
Also this makes no consideration for similar buildings. The company i work for has a campus where 5 of the 7 buildings are cookie cutter - how would it deal with that situation.
Nokia has a street in helsinki with a whole bunch of identical buildings... same problem.
What about mirror glass buildings?
Sure it might work great if you are lost outside the transamerica pyramid, or the flatiron building, or maybe the houses of parliament but god help you if you are lost in the latest "homely community for comfortable family living"
Not only that, i see another problem would be the distortion inherent in all camera lenses. Using a diffrent phone camera or even diffrent batches of the same phone might yeald a diffrent picture.
Because of lens geometry, even though a picture was taken from the same spot and the same angle, the distortions from the lens would make the image appear magnified, or concaved or simply have varying degrees of image detail.
Since this system works by identifying geometric shapes and outlines in an image and then compare it to a database, the diffrences in the lens curveture ought to give results that don't reflect the true geometry of a building.
So it'd be interesting to find out how, if they solved this problem.
__
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
I really don't have any disagreements with what you're saying, but I believe a digital pictoral map could be a great help here as well. You don't really have to stop to take the picture, just point at an interesting building, snap the photo and wait for the processing. And as I've posted somewhere else, with devices like the iPod, you could carry a localized copy of the database around with you, so that as long as you aren't completely away from the area *say, a 100 mile block*, you should be able to find where you're going.
;).
I just see this new technology as the next level of cartography, and one that should've been invented by now. The more ways you can tell a human how to get from point a, to point b, the more ways they can come up with to improve that method, tell others that method, and simply, innovate.
Street signs and talking to people in corner shops isn't always an option though, especially if you were in say, Tokyo, and you didn't speak japanese
All very valid discussion, I just believe it is far too early to discount a new technology, without seeing what all it can be capable of.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
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?
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)
Imagine driving up to Quebec and trying to find your way around. Most everyone speaks french.
...
:-)
Just show them your non-US passport and it's impressive how good their english suddenly becomes
Well, this trick worked for years in eastern european countries where the only language in common with the people there was German, but they didn't really want to talk to you unless they were sure you weren't from Germany. Seems that they lost that curse now
bash$
I think you missed the part, where it pulls your relative location off of the tower you're using.
This may speed up the search, but doesn't really change anything about the sheer amount of data (and the difficulty to collect it)
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.
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.
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)!
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
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?
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!