It would be neet all right for this system to work! I wounder how far along it is. On Mon, 12 Apr 2004, Janina Sajka wrote: > > Photo recognition software gives location > > 10 April 2004 > > from The New Scientist > http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994857 > > For a small fee, photo recognition software on a remote server works out precisely where you are, and sends back directions that will get you to your > destination. > > You are lost in a foreign city, you don't speak the language and you are late for your meeting. What do you do? Take out your cellphone, photograph > the nearest building and press send. > > For a small fee, photo recognition software on a remote server works out precisely where you are, and sends back directions that will get you to your > destination. That, at least, is what two researchers at the University of Cambridge in the UK hope their software will one day be used for. > > Photo positioning > > Roberto Cipolla and Duncan Robertson have developed a program that can match a photograph of a building to a database of images. The database contains > a three-dimensional representation of the real-life street, so the software can work out where the user is standing to within one metre. > > Line of sight > > This is far better than existing systems can manage. GPS satellite positioning is accurate to 10 metres at best, and can be useless in cities where > tall buildings shield the user from direct line of sight with the satellites. And positioning using cellphone base stations has a precision of between > 50 and 100 metres. > > "Telling people 'You are in the vicinity of X' is no good to man nor beast," says John Craig of Cambridge Positioning Systems, a company that develops > software for locating mobile phones. > > Unlike the GPS or cellphone base station approaches, Cipolla and Robertson's software can tell which direction you are facing. So the service can > launch straight into a set of directions such as "turn to your left and start walking", or give information on the building in the photograph. > > When their system receives an image it begins by identifying vertical and horizontal lines. Next, it warps the image so that the horizontals are all > parallel with each other, and the same for verticals. This transforms the picture into one that was taken square on, rather than at an angle. > > -- > > Janina Sajka, Director > Technology Research and Development > Governmental Relations Group > American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) > > Email: janina at afb.net Phone: (202) 408-8175 > > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup >
