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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."
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.
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
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"
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.