Image recognition has been, and still is, one of the holy grail for computer scientists that are struggling to find a way for a computer to do what seems so easy and natural to us.
There have been enormous progress in this area although to the lay person they may seem quite un-impressive! It is so easy to spot a chair in a living room, what’s the big deal? And of course, once you realise that the image recognition program failed to detect the scarf on the chair or mistook it for a magazine…. you are even less un-impressed!
To those in the loop, however, the progress has been amazing, and discovering, as I did today, that we can have a quite good image recognition program on our smart phone is sort of spectacular.
Go to the Apple Apps Store and download Aipoly Vision. Then look at an object through your smart phone camera and the app will voice the name of the object, car, chair, flower, and write it on the screen.
The app will increase its capability to recognise objects and it will do that through crowdsourcing effort. When the app does not recognise an object, or makes a mistake, the user can provide the right solution. This is shared through the web and all apps will increase their knowledge.
For me this app is a nice gadget reminding me of the progress made in image recongnition but for a visual impaired person this app can be really useful!