Skip to main content

Descriptive Camera: Point, Shoot, Read

The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera — point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene. Rather than using some kind of advanced AI that can read images, it simply passes the description task to Amazon's Mechanical Turk system, which in turn distributes the job to humans. Between 3 to 6 minutes after taking the pictures - slightly longer than a Polaroid takes to develop a picture – the Descriptive Camera spits out the description in a piece of paper.

The Amazon Mechanical Turk, for those who are unfamiliar, is a crowdsourcing Internet marketplace that enables developers (known as Requesters) to submit Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) for workers on the internet to complete, tasks that computers are unable to perform such as choosing the best among several photographs, writing product descriptions, or describing the content of an image.

Descriptive-Camera

Descriptive-Camera-output

The camera is powered by an embedded Linux platform (BeagleBone) and takes pictures using a USB webcam which is attached to a thermal printer for printing the output. A series of Python scripts define the interface and bring together all the different parts from capture, processing, error handling, and the printed output. The device connects to the internet via Ethernet and gets power from an external 5 volt source.

After the shutter button is pressed, the photo is sent to Mechanical Turk for processing and the camera waits for the results. A yellow LED indicates that the results are still "developing". With a HIT price of $1.25, results are returned typically within 6 minutes and sometimes as fast as 3 minutes. The thermal printer outputs the resulting text in the style of a polaroid print.

Checkout the creator’s blog for sample output from the Descriptive Camera.

[via Metafilter]

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

69 alternatives to the default Facebook profile picture

If you have changed the default Facebook profile picture and uploaded your own, it’s fine. But if not, then why not replace that boring picture of the guy with a wisp of hair sticking out of his head with something different and funny?

How to Record CPU and Memory Usage Over Time in Windows?

Whenever the computer is lagging or some application is taking too long to respond, we usually fire up task manager and look under the Performance tab or under Processes to check on processor utilization or the amount of free memory available. The task manager is ideal for real-time analysis of CPU and memory utilization. It even displays a short history of CPU utilization in the form of a graph. You get a small time-window, about 30 seconds or so, depending on how large the viewing area is.

How to Schedule Changes to Your Facebook Page Cover Photo

Facebook’s current layout, the so called Timeline, features a prominent, large cover photo that some people are using in a lot of different creative ways. Timeline is also available for Facebook Pages that people can use to promote their website or business or event. Although you can change the cover photo as often as you like, it’s meant to be static – something which you design and leave it for at least a few weeks or months like a redesigned website. However, there are times when you may want to change the cover photo frequently and periodically to match event dates or some special promotion that you are running or plan to run. So, here is how you can do that.