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'"
Bar code? (Score:4, Funny)
Like standing up and holding up five fingers to let everyone know the next bar is the "Five Spot".
Oh well, live and learn.
Re:Bar code? (Score:1)
Hand over the geek license, socialite.
Re:Bar code? (Score:2)
No, I'm not *that* old... this was in Korea in the 80s.
Bar code scanning powered phones? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bar code scanning powered phones? (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps the product is aimed toward use IN SOVIET RUSSIA?
Re:Bar code scanning powered phones? (Score:2)
Re:Bar code scanning powered phones? (Score:2)
Re:Bar code scanning powered phones? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Bar code scanning powered phones? (Score:2)
Re:Bar code scanning powered phones? (Score:2)
l ll lll
l ll lll
l ll lll
l ll lll -- Barcode
. -- Earth
If all goes well, we could have it in mass-production by early spring of `45.
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:Bar code scanning powered phones? (Score:3, Informative)
Be prepared to be ushered out of the store. Chain stores frequently use "secret shoppers" for price comparisons in their areas, and they used to use small handheld scanners for data entry. I bet cell phones are high on the list of inconspicuous tools now, though. Either way, if they're spotted they're shown the door.
Home Depot (and others) also have "No Cameras or Recording Devices" signs posted, so I'm sure they think they reser
Re:Bar code scanning powered phones? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Bar code scanning powered phones? (Score:2)
Come on, something simple like that should not need the interference of a lawyer? Lawyers might have their place in society but their involvement with day-to-day live should be as minimal as possible. Call the shop manager instead and have him explain why they tell you to photograph ceiling fans in their commercials and when you then act as a gullible sheep and do exactly what their marketroids told you they start whining.
No lawyer needed
Re:Bar code scanning powered phones? (Score:1)
Not bad... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not bad... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not bad... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Not bad... (Score:2, Informative)
Although Japan and Russia got there a bit quicker ... Intelcom provide a encoder and decoder Java toolkit [intelcom.ru] for mobile phones [intelcom.ru]. Japan have a Sourceforge Java project [sourceforge.jp] for encoding and decoding too.
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 i
Re:object recognition (Score:1)
Image recognition my foot (Score:2)
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.
Re:Other uses (Score:4, Funny)
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 (Score:1)
If it's not universal if it was to be supported by the media you'd need a couple of inches for the article and another 3 pages for the scanning sections (for Nokia, scan here; For Samsung scan here, etc).
At least bar codes is kind of established... but you'd still need to store a bar code mapping somewhere - in the tinyurl vein perh
Re:Other uses (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Other uses (Score:1)
Re:Other uses (Score:5, Informative)
Yet another area where Japanese cell phones are WAY ahead of the US...
In Japan ... not only bar codes ... OCR as well (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Other uses (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Other uses (Score:1)
Re:Other uses (Score:1)
The government, here in the UK is adopting this technology. Phones are given to the partially sighted people, then at zebra crossings they can take a photo and the phone can tell them where they are.
The Java stack in the phone calls the highways agency using SOAP, this then cross references the zebra crossing ID with the lat-lon, this is used with XML to look up the street address via maps.google.co.uk, the street name is then passed to an operator who phones the mobile and talks to the partially sighted p
Re:Other uses (Score:1)
Joan Collins will have something to say about that.
Re:Other uses (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Other uses (Score:1, Insightful)
Second: Entering webadresses on a mobile phone UI is allways a lot of work. When this system is adopted widely, you could just scan the barcode at the bus stop, to load the page with bus times, scan the code at a painting (in or outside a museum), to get more info about it,
Re:Other uses (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Other uses (Score:1)
Re:Other uses (Score:2)
In other words, they don't care if you remember the billboard, as long as you recognize the name/picture/slogan/it that was on it the next time you're shopping.
Re:Other uses (Score:2, Informative)
Exactly this has been available and used everywhere in Japan for a few years already.
In Japan, these are all over the place (Score:2)
Re:Other uses (Score:1)
Re:Other uses (Score:2)
I don't think I'd mind that. I already use the camera in my phone to take photos of price tags + model numbers of things I see when I go shopping. When I get home I look up reviews etc. My next phone's going to be a Treo. I'm digging the idea of getting the reviews right there at th
We understand... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:We understand... (Score:1)
Now heres something useful (Score:2)
Re:Now heres something useful (Score:2)
Lookup Required (Score:4, Informative)
You need then to lookup that code up in a database for real info.
Re:Lookup Required (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:1)
They will find a unique solution to making that feature utterly useless, such as not telling the user that the price is after a Mail-In-Rebate that expired yesterday.
PS: have Opera on your phone? You may already have that feature: Try this http://froogle.google.com/froogle?btnG=Search+Froo gle&q=sandisk&addr=90210&lnk=flp&lmode=local [google.com]
And uh, no
Re:Lookup Required (Score:5, Informative)
"It needs to locate and read two-dimensional barcodes"
Nowadays, PDF417 [wikipedia.org] is the standard for 2d barcodes.
http://www.barcodeman.com/faq/2dbarcode.gif [barcodeman.com]
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.
Some envelope-back calculations (Score:3, Informative)
At most, a 320x240 tag would give you 76,800 bits of information, or slightly less than 11,000 7-bit ASCII characters. That's assuming you could match the pixels of the tag to the camera's sensor exactly.
I assume you probably wouldn't want to use any more than half of the camera's vertical and horizontal resolution though, which leaves you with 160x120 (for 2,700 characters), and I assume you'd need to have
Re:Some envelope-back calculations (Score:2)
Re:Lookup Required (Score:2)
Re:Lookup Required (Score:1)
Incidentally the reason that this technology has taken so long to reach the rest
Getting soft (Score:4, Insightful)
> 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.
Re:Getting soft (Score:2)
Re:Getting soft (Score:1)
That would be a 2MHz processor...
Re:Getting soft (Score:3, Insightful)
Rendering 3D and making sense of a real 3D environment are quite different feats however.
Re:Getting soft (Score:2)
In fact, making sense of a real 3D environment is not here yet, and gadgets (not full computers, mind you) that read bar code are common-place for decades.
Re:Getting soft (Score:1)
I may not be an expert on this, but I would say that generating images typically takes less computing power than analyzing them.
Hold your horses (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Hold your horses (Score:2)
I'm downloading the video on a cable modem at a sustained 1.5MB/sec (bytes, not bits).
It seems unslashstoppable.
Re:Hold your horses (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hold your horses (Score:1, Offtopic)
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:Use this for payment/tickets (Score:3, Interesting)
Business Card Scanner (Score:1, Informative)
Not unique (Score:4, Informative)
And there's a company called Grabba [grabba.com] 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.
Re:Not unique (Score:1)
Re:Not unique (Score:2)
I see those all over the place [exblog.jp] on Japanese websites.
The US is really playing catch-up with cell-phone technology.
i don't know which phone they are using (Score:1)
Re:i don't know which phone they are using (Score:2)
Re:i don't know which phone they are using (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, the image resolution is low but you need to take into account that another spec mentioned is 1MB of Java heap memory. The captured images are stored in Java Image obejcts uncompressed. So the memory requirement for a QVGA (320x240) four-bytes-per-pixel RGBA image is 307,200 bytes, which will fit well within the 1MB of heap memory.
The phone camera will probably be able to capture images with a higher resolution (up to megapixels), but because of this Java heap memory limitation they probably need to l
Re:i don't know which phone they are using (Score:2)
Comparison Shopping (Score:2)
We don't need to invent new things to add bar codes to. There are already dozens of ways to use this system if it could interface with existing bar codes. If i'm at Borders I'd love to scan a barcode on a book and bring up its reviews, If I have a UPS label I'd love to be able to scan the barcode to view its s
So the new patent model is... (Score:2)
Re:So the new patent model is... (Score:2)
Impressive? These guys here do it real-time. (Score:1, Informative)
Nothing new (Score:1, Redundant)
Impressive? These guys here do it real-time. (Score:1)
10 year old POS? (Score:1)
Re:10 year old POS? (Score:1)
Re:10 year old POS? (Score:2)
Been there, done that... (Score:2)
I'm actually fairly surprised the slashdot editors don't have a treo and follow palmgear or other palm development sites. There already is a bar code scanner you can get for free for your treo:
BarCode [palmgear.com]
Of course, quality isn't perfect but it does work. Mostly. Reads the barcode and copies the number stream results to your clipboard.
That's Pretty Neat (Score:2)
A bar code reading cellphone, well I think our customers would have jumped at them. Even if the
Barcode recognition != image recognition (Score:2)
I don't think this is new.... unless in USA.. (Score:2)
They even have pay-for-train-ticket and pay-for-groceries-and-other-things by cell.
While not light years ahead in all areas, Japan trounces the USA in some interesting and invisible ways. I had an analog TV phone (with FM radio, 1.2 megapixel camera, tweaking ability of the hundreds of polyphonics tunes inside, removable SD card, JP/Eng interface, memo, cal, many alarms, and more.) there f
Other barcode representations for Mobiles (Score:2)
Just in case anyone needed to know....
T.
Or you can just use open source for UPC (Score:2)
Why not offload it to distributed computing? (Score:2)
Pretty soon, the bandwidth available to mobile devices and cellphones will be plenty for sending photos and other data across.
How will retailers take this? (Score:1)
Been there, done that. (Score:2)
A few years ago, they added the ability to scan those 2D "barcodes", and they're everywhere in Japan. You scan the code, and it forwards your phone to a promotional website.
Get with the times!
Re:Been there, done that. (Score:1)
Best site for the info is at http://theponderingprimate.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
he has pretty much the most comprehensive overview of this space.
Cheers,
Dean
www.collins.net.pr/blog
Image Recognition: Cellphone Transaction - Image X (Score:1)
Re:When barcodes came out ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:When barcodes came out ... (Score:2, Informative)
Bear in mind the "virtual machine" on most phones is in fact simply a slow interpreter - it makes BASIC look souped-up.
Presumably you're referring to the KVM (the J2ME JVM) which is slow. I think you're out of date.
AFAIK modern phones have Sun's CLDC HotSpot VM (the "CLDC HI VM") which has speeds equivilent in relative terms to a JVM on a desktop PC. The Blackberry phones in particular have a great JVM. When more phones have decent ARM-based gigahertz processors speed Java speed will stop being an issu
Re:When barcodes came out ... (Score:2)