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

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...

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.