Image Recognition on Mobile Phones 115
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'"
Not bad... (Score:5, Interesting)
Other uses (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Use this for payment/tickets (Score:3, Interesting)
We even have a video [link-u.com] 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.
Re:Bar code scanning powered phones? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Other uses (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Bar code scanning powered phones? (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Use this for payment/tickets (Score:3, Interesting)
object recognition (Score:2, Interesting)
Could you tell me which approach was used in your project? I mean, I don't need an uber-detailed description, just some key facts; ex: "we used correlation", or maybe you applied some sort of scaling\rotation - invariant techniques, etc.
As a student, I experimented with image processing last year, and I was amazed by all the cool things that could be done with different algorithms, but I never managed to write a tool that could recognize an object on an image. It sort of worked, but I haven't had time to finalize it and release a version that would work for others too, not only for me, only when launched with a debugger, and only at step-by-step execution :-)
How reliable is object detection on a 3x2 sample? Looking for an orange ball on such a small image... Hmm, won't it be just an orange pixel on such a small image?
Another question - was that pattern recognition? i.e. your program was fed with images of orange balls and it attempted to find them on the target images, or did you somehow define an orange ball (ex: "a closed curve, the color of which must be within the specified RGB range") and the program had to figure the rest by itself?