Google Outlines AI-Based Number Reading For Street View Photos

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."

Comments

what happens when it reads 0 / 0?

[Joe_Dragon]

does it crash?

Re:what happens when it reads 0 / 0?

[Ksevio]

Might run into problems when it drives by my house at number:
42'); DROP TABLE street_numbers; --

US Census TIGER/Line shape files?

[Anonymous Coward]

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/

Re:Captcha just failed

[djl4570]

Then we'll have to migrate to "Cutest kitten"

I have an idea....

[salva84]

http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2011/11/8ca4aa827c1151851324895f5ffb778b.jpg

Last lesson of ml_class.org

[doudou42]

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...

Sponsored by the US drone program

[Mister Liberty]

n/t