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Google's Latest Machine Vision Breakthrough

Posted by Soulskill on from the can-now-gauge-your-receptivity-to-ads-by-scanning-your-face dept.

mikejuk writes "Google Research recently released details of a Machine Vision technique which might bring high power visual recognition to simple desktops and even mobile computers. It claims to be able to recognize 100,000 different types of object within a photo in a few minutes — and there isn't a deep neural network mentioned. It is another example of the direct 'engineering' approach to implementing AI catching up with the biologically inspired techniques. This particular advance is based on converting the usual mask-based filters to a simpler ordinal computation and using hashing to avoid having to do the computation most of the time. The result of the change to the basic algorithm is a speed-up of around 20,000 times, which is astounding. The method was tested on 100,000 object detectors using over a million filters on multiple resolution scalings of the target image, which were all computed in less than 20 seconds using nothing but a single, multi-core machine with 20GB of RAM."

2 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. Re:20GB?? That's it??? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This isn't 2005, 32GB in a workstation costs peanuts nowadays. Come out from under your rock.

    Cashews, maybe, but not peanuts.

  2. Re:Coming to mobile? by faffod · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Current mobile seems to cap out at 2MB of RAM. There is a reason for this - power consumption. RAM requires a continuous trickle of power to maintain state. An increase in RAM leads to a direct increase in power consumption. Mobile improvements are going to be focused on power consumption rather than raw power. Moore's law will be followed, but it will not result in something that is 2x more RAM, it will result in something that is 2x less power drain. Ok, I will grant you that it will probably be a mix - some increase in RAM, some increase in computation, but a significant increase in battery life.

    To go from 2GB to 30GB following Moore's law would take 8 years. I contend that it will take longer than that because we won't see exact doubling of specs due to improvements in power. Either way, 10 years is far enough out that I think the summary claiming that this will come to mobile is far fetched for now.