Image Recognition on Mobile Phones

mysticalgremlin writes "In a recent presentation, Semacode founder Simon Woodside presents his company's bar code scanning technology that is used in mobile phones. Simon also discusses many places where bar code scanning powered phones are being used. Not bad for an 'image recognizer for a 100 MHz mobile phone processor with 1 MB heap, 320x240 image, on a poorly-optimized Java stack'"

Comments

Lookup Required

[hey]

Once a barcode is read you just get the product code. What good is that?
You need then to lookup that code up in a database for real info.

Re:Lookup Required

[TubeSteak]

They aren't trying to recognize 1-D barcodes (ya know, normal barcodes).

"It needs to locate and read two-dimensional barcodes"

Nowadays, PDF417 is the standard for 2d barcodes.
http://www.barcodeman.com/faq/2dbarcode.gif

It can store between 10 and a crapload of characters

A 320x240 image gives you plenty of characters, depending on how much redundancy you want to throw in.

Re:Other uses

[mehu]

If your mobile phone can read barcodes, we could print them anywhere - in papers, on billboards, TV adverts - and all you'd need to do is take a photo and your phone automatically loads the webpage in its built-in browser.

This is already standard in Japan- barcode readers come on pretty much every cell phone here. They read special 2d-matrix barcodes that look like this, which generally encode a URL or email address. You don't even need to take a picture of it in the usual sense- you run a little app called "barcode scanner" and just hold your phone over it, and as soon as it recognizes the barcode, it instantly launches the web browser or opens a new email with a specified To: address & possibly a predetermined Subject: line. They're often used on posters & product ads as a "get more info by scanning here" thing, or even to sign up for store memberships & things- hold your phone over the little square, and you instantly get a web page w/ a form to enter your info. Much faster than typing a URL on your phone.

Yet another area where Japanese cell phones are WAY ahead of the US...

Not unique

[csirac]

I've seen some Japanese phones that have apparently had this ability for quite some time now, I was absolutely amazed when a friend showed me one that even OCR'd english text out of a snapshot!

And there's a company called Grabba that makes commercial bar-code scanning solutions out of PDAs and PDA-phones (among other things). A friend of mine works there... interesting stuff; they also sell a dock thing that a PDA can clip into, which gives it a camera so you don't need to use a mobile phone. Popular with inventory/warehouse type applications, it also does 2D barcodes as well.

In Japan ... not only bar codes ... OCR as well

[mxpengin]

My phone ( which I have had for more than half a year ) besides the bar code reader, has OCR of roman and japanese characters. And the most impresive use of this in the telephone is the ability to input some japanese word (yes in Kanji) directly into the dictionary. Really impresive for us non native japanese speakers. My phone is a sanyo w32SA , in the link you can read about in the part OCR kino.