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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'"
Beleive it or not this is pretty impressive. Computer vision gets quite difficult when you don't have a lot of pixels to work with, as the shapes are all "helpfully" smeared together by the imager. And with the cheap lenses in camera phones, edges can be smeared by more than one pixel. In some of my prior work doing vision systems for Sony Aibos for RoboCup, we had to deal with similar problems (find an orange ball in an image that may be only 3x2 pixels, while ignoring the boundaries between red and yellow objects). So, kudos for the technical achievement, and hopefully they find a better application than the cuecat :)
Some years ago, I read an article about the possibility of printing tiny barcodes in newspaper stories that would code for a website address. You'd use a special reader that interfaces with your PC to visit the referenced site. This was supposed to be easier than typing in a lengthy, complicated URL.
We've got around this, mostly by having nice succinct URLs and tinyurl.com for everything else, and who wants to carry a barcode reader with them when they're reading the paper?
However, I wonder whether this idea may have some re-interest. 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.
That might be useful.
Argh.