FAB-MAP in the News

Robot News

Today’s edition of the New Scientist news feed includes an article about my PhD research. How nice! They called the article ‘Chaos filter stops robots getting lost’. This is kind of  a bizarre title – ‘chaos filter’ seems to be a term of their own invention :).  Still, they mostly got things mostly right. I guess that’s journalism!

Whatever about the strange terminology, it’s great to see the research getting out there. It’s also nice to see the feedback from Robert Sim, who made a rather impressive vision-only robotic system with full autonomy a few years ago, still quite a rare accomplishment.

For anyone interested in the details of the system, have a look at my publications page. New Scientist’s description more or less resembles how our system works, but many of the specifics are a little wide of the mark. In particular, we’re not doing hierarchical clustering of visual words as the article describes – instead we learn a Bayesian network that captures the visual word co-occurrence statistics. This achieves a similar effect in that we implicitly learn about objects in the world, but with none of the hard decisions and awkward parameter tuning involved in clustering.

The Really Big Picture

Random Interesting

I was at a lunch talk today by Nick Bostrom, of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. The institute has an unusual mandate to consider the really big picture: human extinction risks, truly disruptive technologies such as cognitive enhancement, life extension and brain emulation, and other issues too large for most people to take seriously. It was a pleasure to hear someone thinking clearly and precisely, in the manner of a good philosopher, about topics that are usually the preserve of crackpots. Prof Bostrom’s website is a treasure trove of papers. An atypical but perhaps robot-relevant example is the Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap.

Posts of the Year

Misc

As I make arrangements to close down things in the lab and prepare for a bit of turkey and ham, I thought I’d put up some of my favourite blog posts from the last year:

Finally, for a bit of fun, check out the Austrian Hexapod Dance Competition:

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Progress at Willow Garage

Robot News, Robotics Companies

Just came across this new video of the Willow Garage PR2 robot. They’re making rapid progress. When they reach their goal of distributing these platforms to research groups around the world, it will be a good day for robotics. One neat package that comes out of the box up many different near-state-of-the-art capabilities. Right now every research group is independently re-creating platforms from scratch, and it’s a huge obstacle to progress.
If you haven’t heard of Willow Garage, I have an overview here.

 You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Update: Another new video, celebrating two successive days of autonomous runs.

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Amazon Remembers

mobile visual search

When it rains, it pours. Amazon is joining the visual search party, but with a twist.

Today Amazon released an iPhone app with a feature called “Amazon Remembers”. You take a picture of some product you’re interested in and the app uploads it to Amazon. You can then revisit your list later from a browser, e.g. to buy the item. The interesting bit is that Amazon attempts to generate a link to the product page based on your image. Examples here. This isn’t instant, and may take anywhere from five minutes to 24 hours.

Fascinatingly, the back end is apparently not computer vision based. It uses Mechanical Turk, where Amazon is paying people $0.10 per image to generate the links. See here. This is quite amazing to me. I have no idea if Mechanical Turk is deep enough to support this app if it truly becomes popular, but I suppose in that case Amazon could set up a dedicated call-centre type operation to handle the image recognition.

So, visual search companies now have a very direct measure of the value of a correct image search. Judging by the current set of images on Mechanical Turk, a fully automated solution is not possible. However, a hybrid system where some easy categories like books are recognised automatically and harder cases are farmed out to Mechanical Turk would clearly translate into significantly lower costs.
(Of course it’s possible Amazon are already doing this, though I did see several books in the Mechanical Turk requests).

Nokia Point and Find

mobile visual search

It seems I missed something fairly major in my round up of mobile visual search companies last week. Nokia have a serious project in the area called Point and Find. You can see a demo here. From MSearchGroove:

“Nokia is committed to owning the visual search space and has committed a staff of 30 to build the business and further develop the technology. The business area has the buy-in of Nokia senior execs and “quite large” funding from the company“

The technology comes from an acquisition of a valley startup called Pixto just over a year ago. Nokia’s service is apparently  due for launch soon, initially recognising movie posters only.

A Round-Up of Mobile Visual Search Companies

mobile visual search

This post is an overview of all the companies developing mobile image recognition search engines. For people to whom that means nothing, see these posts. My robotics readers will have to forgive me for my sudden obsession with this topic, but I work on visual search engines for my PhD, and I’m giving serious thought to joining this industry in one form or another in the next six months, so I’m rather excited to see commercial applications taking off. More

Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford

Misc

I’ll be at Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford all day today. This has been an excellent event in previous years, and there is a strong line-up again this year. Anyone interested in visual search technology, do come say hello.

Update: I heard some great talks today and met lots of interesting people during coffee. Chris Sacca’s pitch workshop was especially good. No bullshit. The most valuable thing was the perspective – all those bits of knowledge that are obvious from the inside but very hard to come by from the outside. And of course hearing Elon Musk was just fantastic.

For those people who were interested in our lab’s visual search engine, there’s an online demo here (scroll down to where it says Real-time Demo). The demo is actually of some older results from about a year ago by a colleague of mine. Things have gotten even better since then.

Computer Vision in the Elastic Compute Cloud

Misc, Thoughts

In a datacenter somewhere on the other side of the planet, a rack-mounted computer is busy hunting for patterns in photographs of Oxford.  It is doing this for 10 cents an hour, with more RAM and more horsepower than I can muster on my local machine. This delightful arrangement is made possible by Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud.

For the decreasing number of people who haven’t heard of EC2, it’s a pretty simple idea. Via a simple command line interface you can “create” a server running in Amazon’s datacenter. You pick a hardware configuration and OS image, send the request and voilà – about 30 seconds later you get back a response with the IP address of the machine, to which you now have root access and sole use.  You can customize the software environment to your heart’s content and then save the disk image for future use. Of course, now that you can create one instance you can create twenty. Cluster computing on tap.

This is an absolutely fantastic resource for research. I’ve been using it for about six months now, and have very little bad to say about it. Computer vision has an endless appetite for computation. Most groups, including our own, have their own computing cluster but demand for CPU cycles typically spikes around paper deadlines, so having the ability to instantly double or triple the size of your cluster is very nice indeed.

Amazon also have some hi-spec machines available. I recently ran into trouble where I needed about 10GB of RAM for a large learning job. Our cluster is 32-bit, so 4GB RAM is the limit. What might have been a serious headache was solved with a few hours and $10 on Amazon EC2.

The one limitation I’ve found is that disk access on EC2 is a shared resource, so bandwidth to disk tends to be about 10MB/s, as opposed to say 70MB/sec on a local SATA hard drive. Disk bandwidth tends to be a major factor in running time for very big out-of-core learning jobs. Happily, Amazon very recently released a new service called Elastic Block Store which offers dedicated disks, though the pricing is a little hard to figure out.

I should mention that for UK academics there is a free service called National Grid, though personally I’d rather work with Amazon.

Frankly, the possibilities opened up by EC2 just blow my mind. Every coder in a garage now potentially has access to Google-level computation. For tech startups this is a dream. More traditional companies are playing too. People have been talking about this idea for a long time, but it’s finally here, and it rocks!

Update: Amazon are keen to help their scientific users. Great!

An Insider’s Guide to BigDog

New Research, Robot News

In common with half of YouTube, I was mesmerized by the BigDog videos from Boston Dynamics earlier in the year, though I couldn’t say much about how the robot worked. For everyone hungry for some more technical details, check out the talk by Marc Raibert at Carnegie Mellon’s Field Robotics 25 event. There’s some interesting discussion of the design of the system, where’s it’s headed, and more great video.

There are a bunch of other worthwhile talks from the event. I particularly enjoyed Hugh Durrant-Whyte’s description of building a fully automated container terminal “without a graduate student in 1000km”.