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

Bar code?

[RedOregon]

And here I thought a bar code was a hand signal you used to let everyone in a large crowd, in a noisy bar, know where you were going next.

Like standing up and holding up five fingers to let everyone know the next bar is the "Five Spot".

Oh well, live and learn.

Bar code scanning powered phones?

[Tim C]

Surely you mean "phone-powered bar code scanning", ie using the phone to scan bar codes, not powering the phone by scanning bar codes...

Re:Bar code scanning powered phones?

[SnowZero]

Surely you mean "phone-powered bar code scanning", ie using the phone to scan bar codes, not powering the phone by scanning bar codes...

Perhaps the product is aimed toward use IN SOVIET RUSSIA?

Re:Bar code scanning powered phones?

[Randolpho]

The temperature of the black bars must be different from the temperature of the white bars -- simple light/color theory. Therefore, using carbon nanotubules (because you aren't high-techy if you don't), we could set up a system of microscopic thermocouples across those black and white bars. Channel that energy to a central location, and voila! Barcode powered cell-phones.

Re:Bar code scanning powered phones?

[andrewman327]

Cuecat + cell phone = next big thing? I find it a little hard to believe, but with everything else that they have been throwing into phone I guess this makes some sense.

My favorite use for this would be to conduct instant price comparisons. If I see something that I like, I would like to be able to check the price against Froogle, MySimon, etc.

Re:Bar code scanning powered phones?

[andrewman327]

Their real concern in banning cameras is not competitors learning their prices. After all, they pay lots of money to publish their weekly flier in the Sunday paper. If a secret shopper wants prices they can also bring a pad and pen to the store and write down the SKUs and costs. When I shop at Home Depot I usually have a notebook with all of my measurements and requirements for whatever I am doing. I highly doubt that most associates would stop someone from walking around writing things down.

The real concern is criminals casing the place for a robbery. Even larger stores can be hit by violent crime. I am an avid amateur photographer and I know my rights. Stores have every right to prevent pictures while you are in their building, but they cannot stop you from photographing their store from the street. (Disclaimer: IANAL). If I were a manager and I saw someone taking pictures of the roof, guards, alarm systems, et cetera, I would definitely throw them out. If theives want to hit a store they also need to know where the expensive stuff is kept, so they would be photographing the products.

When I am at Comp USA most of their (otherwise frustrating) sales reps allow me to use their computers to compare the prices of items at other stores. I have bought more from them after learning that they were the best deal during their huge sales. If I walked in with a camera, that would be a different story.

Not bad...

[SnowZero]

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 :)

Other uses

[HugePedlar]

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.

Re:Other uses

[cnettel]

Fancy a set of scrabble-like plastic pieces, with additional barcode cues (barcode + distinct letter form would be easier than just the letter). Then you "set" your text message almost like on an old-style printing press, take a snapshot and voilà!

Coming next: Non-invasive optical punch card recognition. Preserve your valuable yellow-tinted records in pristine condition, while emulating your IBM from the 60s on the cellphone.

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:Other uses

[RobotRunAmok]

It was called a "cuecat," and it became one of the great punchlines (along with AOL CDs, foosball tables, VRML, and Jon Katz) of the dot-com era. Cuecats presumed that people read magazines alongside their computers, completely missing the point that if anyone was that "wired" he would be reading his magazines online to begin with.

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.

These are the generic mass "in-your-face" ads that people, generally, try to avoid but cannot. Ads we "want to see," at least in theory, are, again, those that materialize in the marginalia of our web pages as a result of our search metadata being analyzed. The mobile phone bar scanners are, like the cuecats, already obsolete. If you can't remember the product the billboard is hawking, the billboarder has not done his basic job and does not deserve any gadgetery boost. And if you can remember the product, you can google it.

Anyone running around pointing his cellphone at a billboard so he can capture the barcode and WAP-surf to the company's website should be rounded up, made to serve Nicholas Negroponte his frappe latte mocchachino in bed for a week, ride a segway from Grand Central Station to Wall Street, and have "TOOL" tatooed on his forehead in front of a crowd of 600 fat, drooling, naked, middle-aged "digerati" marketing execs at the next Burning Man festival.

We understand...

[novus ordo]

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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

[Orange Crush]

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.

As mentioned above, it could give you the lowest prices found on Froogle, Amazon, etc . . . or if they want to do something *really* neat, tell you if that product is available for considerably less (or on sale!) at a different store nearby.

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.

Getting soft

[Threni]

> 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'"

10 or so years ago we had 3d games on 7mhz machines with 512k of ram, pretty much the same screen resolution yadda yadda - this isn't so impressive.

Use this for payment/tickets

[NusEnFleur]

My colleague once wrote a prototype doing the same thing (barcode recognition). This is also a nice solution for building tickets. THe main advantage is that you can give the guy at the entrance just one phone and he'll be able to scan entry tickets without the need for a computer or heavy equipment.

We even have a video showing this technology being used for payment. Note that in the video you see the recognition engine in java run on a PC with a webcam, but the same engine runs on many MIDP 2.0 phones (like a nokia 6230) and is also able to find a barcode instantly. In this case the phone is only used as a client for the payment concept.

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.