Slashdot Mirror
Teaching Computers to See with Games
An anonymous reader writes "The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a story on Peekaboom, a two-player on-line game in which one player tries to get the other player to guess a word associated with an image, by revealing parts of the image one click at a time. From the article, "The process of revealing objects, or highlighting images within the larger context of the photo, is the sort of thing that researchers in computer vision must do to teach computers to see.""
I'm no expert on this-- can anyone offer ways it could or couldn't work?
The human eye works in a similar way. The first layer of optic nerve after the retina recognise dots. The next layers recognise contrast and patterns in the previous layers, i.e. lines, edge recognition, etc. By the time it gets to the brain it's already broken down into basic shapes, at which point there are nerves that have been taught to look for certain combinations of shape and colour are triggered, causing the sensation of recognition.
I assumed some pattern recognition would already work like this. Could be wrong though.
The site works like a champ on my Mozilla (bangbang023). The game is a Java app and requires Sun's JRE 1.4 or later, so perhaps that's what's causing the problem for you.
http://www.aladdin.cs.cmu.edu/workshops/lamps05/Sl ides/Peekaboom.ppt
the one in google's index now seems to be broken