Well, since we're already somewhat off topic, one of the most amazing presentations I went to at CSUN was a product called SeeScan from a company called iVisit. It uses a camera image to do object recognition based on pictures. In the demo they laid out a bunch of stuff such as cereal boxes, CDs, US currency and all they did was aim the camera to have it read off what it was. They ran it on some small computer about the size of an old-school walkman tape player about 1"x5"x7" and a USB camera. It apparently can handle differing angles, orientations and lighting automatically and completes the acquisition and recognition about 4 times a second. So pretty much as soon as they aimed it at a $5 bill it started saying "five dollar bill" over and over until they aimed it at something else. It can even handle partially obscured objects such as a credit card that is partly under a piece of paper. They tested it with 10 blind users and had 100% success identifying objects. I asked them about scalability since I might want to have a whole grocery store worth of objects loaded up. They said it can handle about 10,000 images in a single database. You can swap out databases and each image takes about 10K after processing (100MB for 10,000 objects). They are hoping there will be online community swaps of databases so you can share what you've already stored. It can 'learn' a new object in about 4 seconds. You just aim it at the object and hit the learn button and then associate some text with the object. The work is being done as part of a grant from the US Veterans Admin (I think) so they said once it's out of the lab it should be cheap because the research costs don't have to be recouped by the manufacturer. They also have a client/server version working with a cell phone camera and a remote processing server.
Sorry for the off-topic but this was pretty incredible and it seemed few people came to their presentation. CB alena.roberts2...@gmail.com wrote: > I am taking a poll on my blog on how to make U.S. paper currency > accessible to the blind. In September of last year, a judge ordered > the treasury to make the money accessible. As far as I know, there has > been no plans to actually change our money. Please visit my blog and > vote. The poll will be open until the middle of next month. I plan to > blog about the results and send them to national blindness > organizations and the treasury department. I think that they need to > know what the blind community needs before they make any changes. > > http://blind-gal.blogspot.com > > Alena > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
