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Google Outlines AI-Based Number Reading For Street View Photos

Posted by timothy on from the may-not-combine-with-remote-detonation dept.

mikejuk writes "A recent Google research paper outlines how it might use AI to read digits in natural images — specifically Street View photos. The idea is to automatically extract the number of each house as captured by Street View and then use this to improve the geocoding data returned by Google. When you next ask for directions to a particular address the new data could be used to show you a street view looking directly at the house you specified."

3 of 68 comments (clear)

  1. US Census TIGER/Line shape files? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've poked around the US Census data which has geographical coordinates of pretty much everything you can imagine - streets, natural landmarks, including addresses.

    How does most mapping software get its dataset? Why does Google need to find street numbers from the photos? (Probably because a public dataset like this isn't available globally) I imagine that Census data is a free alternative but professional geolocation data requires big fees.

    http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/

  2. Captcha just failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If it can read a digit in a pattern then capchta just became useless as a way of keeping bots out of a website

  3. Last lesson of ml_class.org by doudou42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's interesting to note that one of the co author is also the teacher for stanford free classe on Machine Learning and that the last lesson of the course was on this topic...