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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.
I can just image the server's cpu goes up to 100% when I send in a photo of McDonald'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.
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.
Turns out the company owns stock in a number of hard drive manufacturers...
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.
What if you took a picture of a McDonalds?
Hell, you could be lost for days.
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.
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
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
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.
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
"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