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Finding Yourself With Photo Recognition

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the no-i'm-not-getting-transcendental dept.

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."

71 of 336 comments (clear)

  1. GIS technologies by BWJones · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
    1. Re:GIS technologies by orthogonal · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      And I fear that there won't be enough "lost tourists" to make this a paying proposition.

      But how much would it be worth to professional historians -- or to Hollywood, or just to you personally -- to be able to "walk" through a virtual representation of New York circa 1890?

      Or London in Holbein's time?

      This is one of those projects -- much like something called ARPANET, which had to rely on government handouts but later made some guy named Steve Case a fortune -- that will never fund itself but will be of literally incalculable value to posterity.

      Let's be realistic -- physics and fanaticism not being mutually incompatible, eventually "freedom fighters" -- whether named Atta, McVeigh, or Patrick Magee -- will make bee-lines for our biggest cities, carrying suitcase filled with two precisely machined hemispheres of plutonium. And everything but the maps of those cities will be lost.

      Hopefully the Cambridge researchers will by then have completed their -- apparently -- quixotic project, and we will at least have, in redundant storage, a rather precise picture of what will be lost to radioactive ruin, a snapshot of urban life in the twenty-first century.

      --
      Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
    2. Re:GIS technologies by Viceice · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.
    3. Re:GIS technologies by Broege · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      For most people even photos aren't necessary. Using the data from nearest cells a mobile could be pinpointed within 100 m accuracy (in urban terrain, it degrades down do about 1000 m in rural terrain). It's enough if you are sent a map with the neighbourhood - the biggest problem then is the size of your mobile's screen.

      Such services (sending a map of the neighbourhood, with interesting points, like ATMs, marked) already exist in Poland (Europe). I find them quite helpful.

      --
      homepage: www.tls.pl
      signature: not found
    4. Re:GIS technologies by mirko · · Score: 2

      Imagine how difficult it would be to capture details like that in a major city such as NYC?

      I thought all the streets of NYC were numbered, thus making this useless unless for folks who cannot count.

      --
      Trolling using another account since 2005.
    5. Re:GIS technologies by Bazzargh · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "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."

      This is one of those enigma style puzzles: you can solve because you know there is a solution. You know that the image is of a building and that the image contains long straight edges. Edge detection would pull out several long curves instead. The problem is reduced to finding the lens function to apply that produces the most long straight lines.

      The work Steve Mann did on photogrammetry (search for "video orbits", I think the project is on sourceforge now) included lens characterization functions for exactly the reasons you describe (he was stitching images together). Only a couple of parameters were required; in the video orbits case you just guessed them, but then Mann didn't have the advantage of knowing there were long straight edges in the image. You just need to fit these parameters to maximize the straight edges in the image.

      Mann's work also covered 'dechirping' transforms that remove perspective effects.

  2. So rather than send out... by Throtex · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... a GPSr reading and request information about that location, we get this?

    Sounds like a solution in search of a problem.

  3. GPS? by ajiva · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:GPS? by ciroknight · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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
    2. Re:GPS? by grahamsz · · Score: 4, Informative

      Even old-style degraded GPS let you get your position to within a few hundred feet. Assuming that a map was returned with a 400 sq ft circle instead of a "you are exactly here" any half intelligent person could figure it out.

      Anyway most cellphone networks can triangulate your position to within a block.

      As for photo recognition being MORE accurate, i cant see how. 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.

      Getting GPRS to work correctly in a foreign country so that you can make such a request is hard enough to begin with.

    3. Re:GPS? by PacoTaco · · Score: 4, Funny
      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).

      Then I think you're going to be late for that meeting.

    4. Re:GPS? by grahamsz · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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"

    5. Re:GPS? by grahamsz · · Score: 2, Insightful

      While buildings built from a duplicate schematic obviously wont be identical, after they've been photographed through a cheap lens, to a cheap ccd, compressed to jpg... the error will dwarf any subtle difference. Also it's easy for me to know that building 2 was built before building 4 and has a lighter, more weathered roof - but a camera cant use that information unless it can take a photo with both buildings in it.

      Stellar travel is a fairly well solved problem, plenty software can predict what the stars look like from different locations/times in the universe and could surely be extended to take the angles of the stars and compute an exact location. Also GPS like systems work great in space.

      The other problem with mirror glass buildings is that, when the sun is at the right angle, they cast sharp lines onto neighboring buildings, which again could confuse the software.

      I'm all for smart OS image similarity libraries - my experience of existing ones shows they are less than stellar, but this just seems like a really contrived use of the technology (although i'm sure identifying buildings is easier than people)

    6. Re:GPS? by BlackHawk-666 · · Score: 3, Funny

      If you're the sort of imbecile that flies to Portugal for a meeting, then tries to drive/walk there yourself without bothering to use a street map or taking a taxi then you're the sort of imbecile who won't have bothered to check the phone number for this service in Portugal. Surely a GPS reading is going to be more sensible? Frankly, people who are this stupid can stay lost in a foreign country for all I care.

      --
      All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
    7. Re:GPS? by dvdeug · · Score: 2, Insightful

      GPS's accuracy can be degraded at any time on the US Military's whim.

      And this system can be shut down at any time on any local judge's injunction. Which is a lot more likely than the US Military degrading something large parts of the US has come to depend on.

      IF there were a Civilian GPS, then this would /almost/ always be a solution.

      So you believe they'll turn off the military GPS on a whim, but will have absolutely no plan to deal with civilian GPS?

      What if there's some other feature about the region blocking satelite traffic, but not wireless traffic

      How high probability is that? What about the converse, when the region gets satelite traffic, but your cell phone doesn't get a signal (say you're in some country where you don't speak the language and it's not covered by your cellphone company?)

  4. try it in my neighborhood by matlantis · · Score: 4, Funny

    Every house looks the same where I live

  5. Problems by Caedar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Problems by tftp · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You presume that each and every building is unique and was built by its own architect. This may be so for downtown areas, but is utterly false in residential and industrial areas - that's where you would need such a system most. The houses in those areas are often built from the same set of blueprints, and likely by the same builder. Even people have trouble navigating by sight in those areas, they have to look for subtler navigational signs, like street numbers :-)

    2. Re:Problems by ratsnapple+tea · · Score: 3, Insightful

      WTF is this supposed to mean?

      To me, this technology would be best for navigating around a bigger city, like New York or Chicago, where the people aren't exactly friendly, where you have to worry about muggers and utterly rude people, and asking for directions is the last thing you'd want to do, let alone get out of your car.

      Maybe when you finally grow the cojones to step out of your SUV, you'll discover people in New York and Chicago aren't the monsters you seem to think they are.

    3. Re:Problems by tftp · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Most of New York is actually quite flat and colorless. The pride is mostly in lower Manhattan, but you won't get lost there anyway, try all you can. Just walk into any street-level business and ask for directions; the clerks are friendly, it's their job at least. If you go north... well, why would you want to have a meeting *there* ??? If you must, you probably need to research your route beforehand, lest you get stuck in a bad place. Also, taking pictures from a car is not a easy plan, and while you wait for the response from the server there will be about 100,000 angry motorists behind you. And no, you can't park anywhere :-)

      In any case, the photographic approach seems to be overly passive. Why can't you walk to a street sign (street corner) and take down the street names, whatever characters you can comprehend? Then send SMS to the server, and get back either a SMS or a picture. I hope you know what city you are in or near? :-)

      Even simpler solution is to call the server and speak to it. Simple voice recognition can be used to transliterate foreign street names or ambiguously sounding English/French ones. And at any time you can ask for an operator (for an extra fee, but if you must, you can.) Comes hands-free too, for continuous driving.

      This service already exists, though, in form of many 411 centers that do nothing but answer questions. And they answer not just mapping questions, but anything else a traveller may need. The work force can be hired locally (thus knowing the area well.)

    4. Re:Problems by ciroknight · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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
    5. Re:Problems by bobbis.u · · Score: 4, Informative
      This is clearly a problem with object recognition and there are certain techniques for doing this that reject the "clutter" in the scene. I'm not sure exactly how this system would work in 3D, but when viewing a planar scene (i.e. objects flat on a table), you can calculate "invariants" associated with the objects in view. Essentially, an invariant is a viewpoint independent representation of the object.

      You would clearly have a library of objects (e.g. buildings) on the servers. When a picture is sent, the service would perform some sort of feature extraction, and calculate the invariants of the objects in the scene. It would then see if these objects nearly matched any in the database. If they did, it would project possible matches onto the image and look for edges around the model. If there was good correlation (accepting the fact that the match would not be perfect because of moveable objects) it would return the name of the building.

      Prof. Cipolla lectures me on (suprise, surprise...) Computer Vision. You can find his lecture handouts here. (the projection handout, page 46 onwards talks about the process I have just described.)

  6. Ideally by phiz187 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Ideally by ciroknight · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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
    2. Re:Ideally by BlackHawk-666 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It would have to be a big act of god since GPS is a string of satellites around the earth and a good GPS reading will take in data from any number of these. I seem to recall picking up 7 or more when trying some readings in Australia. What sort of accident are you planning that will knock out ALL of the satelites? GPS would just run with reduced service quality if it lost only a few satelites.

      --
      All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
  7. Won't work by ExCEPTION · · Score: 5, Funny

    I can just image the server's cpu goes up to 100% when I send in a photo of McDonald's.

  8. Oh good lord. by PedsDoc · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is this really necessary? Not everything needs to be so darned tech, you know... maybe we should just get a map and use that.

  9. GPS Does This by crass751 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  10. This seems infinitely more useful... by Throtex · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ... 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.

  11. Finding Yourself With Photo Recognition by agurkan · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Finding Yourself With Photo Recognition by MavEtJu · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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$ :(){ :|:&};:
  12. So, let me get this straight... by Spiffae · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:So, let me get this straight... by phiz187 · · Score: 3, Informative

      I think you missed the part, where it pulls your relative location off of the tower you're using. -PHiZ

      --
      Pretend I said something meaningful or insightful here.
    2. Re:So, let me get this straight... by chgros · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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)

  13. massive computational infrastructure by Black+Mage+Balthazar · · Score: 4, Funny

    Turns out the company owns stock in a number of hard drive manufacturers...

  14. Why? by dakan · · Score: 2, Insightful

    How about using mapquest before you leave?

    --
    -This sig has been discontinued after a sudden realization.
  15. Little far fetched by $exyNerdie · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  16. Hand gestures? by mark_space2001 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    You are lost in a foreign city, you don't speak the language and you are late for your meeting.

    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.

    1. Re:Hand gestures? by Jardine · · Score: 4, Funny

      Make sure to speak English very slowly too. All foreign people actually understand it as long as it's spoken slowly.

  17. i read a copy of the directions ... by seringen · · Score: 2, Funny

    it asks you to make sure that you get the street sign and a building number in the shot

  18. What if... by Bill_Royle · · Score: 4, Funny

    What if you took a picture of a McDonalds?

    Hell, you could be lost for days.

  19. How do you compile the dataset? by grahamsz · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  20. It will never be used... by INeededALogin · · Score: 2, Funny

    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:-)

  21. What do you do? by $exyNerdie · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!!

    1. Re:What do you do? by tftp · · Score: 4, Insightful
      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!!

      If I am in a country which language I do not understand, my secret plan would be to take a taxi cab from the hotel (and back.) If the meeting is so important, I can not trust an inexperienced traveller (myself) to deliver me to the location and back.

  22. Make sure you take a good picture... by jea6 · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
  23. My real point... by grahamsz · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  24. Depends.... by raehl · · Score: 2, Funny

    If you're meeting with Osama, you'll be right on time.

    --
    paintball
  25. It's cheaper than the current solution.... by raehl · · Score: 4, Funny

    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
  26. Alternate use #1 by Chuck+Chunder · · Score: 2, Funny

    Taking "intimate" photos and seeing what building you most resemble.

    --
    Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
  27. Many problems by rabs · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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

  28. How? by gnu-sucks · · Score: 2, Funny

    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?

  29. Sounds like a solution ... by jayzee · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ... for which we do not yet have an adequate probelm

    --

    Mole? 4? Cars?
  30. Alternate uses...? by huchida · · Score: 2, Interesting
    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'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?

  31. D'oh by lintmint · · Score: 2, Funny

    And to think I've been using street signs when I could of just photographed a building.

  32. Mod parent up, please. by spamania · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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 .sig is a troll.
  33. What do you DO?!? by errxn · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.
  34. Why Bother? by windside · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  35. Re:Better than GPS . by nacturation · · Score: 2, Informative

    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).

    And how will this improve on 10m accuracy? Will you have to submit your camera lens's focal length as well in order to determine the distance from the photographed objects? Humans generally can't tell the difference between a 20mm lens photographing at 40m vs. a 35mm lens at 70m but this software can supposedly get 1m accuracy levels? I very much doubt this.

    --
    Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
  36. You take a picture of your friend... by qualico · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...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!

  37. Sounds like Iraq to me by leereyno · · Score: 2, Funny

    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.
  38. This is cool by overlordhab · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  39. Same Same but different. you can do this today. by VC · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  40. Lost in St Petersburg (Russia) by tomrud · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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)!
  41. The inventor's 2 cents worth by dpr20 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  42. So what about winter ? by thrill12 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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
  43. A better way... by adamofgreyskull · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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!!

  44. Collaborative GPS mapping by sonamchauhan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  45. triangulate by dragonfly28 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    maybe I'm just plain stupid here but why not triangulate your position with gsm-transmitters to get your postion?

  46. Hotels are good for directions by erroneous · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "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
  47. 2 Simple reasons by MantiX · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!