[Nfbf-l] Device from Israeli start-up gives the visually impaired a way to read.

[Alan Dicey]

Device from Israeli start-up gives the visually impaired a way to read.
By JOHN MARKOFF, June 3, 2013.
JERUSALEM -  Liat Negrin, an Israeli who has been visually impaired since 
childhood, walked into a grocery store here recently, picked up a can of 
vegetables and easily read its label using a simple and unobtrusive camera 
attached to her glasses.
Ms. Negrin, who has coloboma, a birth defect that perforates a structure of 
the eye and afflicts about 1 in 10,000 people, is an employee at OrCam, an 
Israeli start-up that has developed a camera-based system intended to give 
the  visually impaired the ability to both "read" easily and move freely.
Until now reading aids for the visually impaired and the blind have been 
cumbersome devices that recognize text in restricted environments, or, more 
recently, have been software applications on smartphones that have limited 
capabilities.
In contrast, the OrCam device is a small camera worn in the style of Google 
Glass, connected by a thin cable to a portable computer designed to fit in 
the wearer's pocket. The system clips on to the wearer's glasses with a 
small  magnet and uses a bone-conduction speaker to offer clear speech as it 
reads aloud  the words or object pointed to by the user.
The system is designed to both recognize and speak "text in the wild," a 
term used to describe newspaper articles as well as bus numbers, and objects 
as diverse as landmarks, traffic lights and the faces of friends.
It currently recognizes English-language text and beginning this week will 
be sold through the company's Web site for $2,500, about the cost of a 
midrange hearing aid. It is the only product, so far, of the privately held 
company, which is part of the high-tech boom in Israel.
The device is quite different from other technology that has been developed 
to give some vision to people who are blind, like the artificial retina 
system called Argus II, made by Second Sight Medical Products. That system, 
which  was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in February, allows 
visual  signals to bypass a damaged retina and be transmitted to the brain.
The OrCam device is also drastically different from Google Glass, which also 
offers the wearer a camera but is designed for people with normal vision and 
has limited visual recognition and local computing power.
OrCam was founded several years ago by Amnon Shashua, a well-known 
researcher who is a computer science professor at Hebrew University here. It 
is based  on computer vision algorithms that he has pioneered with another 
faculty  member, Shai Shalev-Shwartz, and one of his former graduate 
students, Yonatan  Wexler.
"What is remarkable is that the device learns from the user to recognize a 
new product," said Tomaso Poggio, a computer scientist at M.I.T. who is a 
computer vision expert and with whom Dr. Shashua studied as a graduate 
student. "This  is more complex than it appears, and, as an expert, I find 
it really  impressive."
The advance is the result of both rapidly improving computing processing 
power that can now be carried comfortably in a wearer's pocket and the 
computer  vision algorithm developed by the scientists.
On a broader technology level, the OrCam system is representative of a wide 
range of rapid improvements being made in the field of artificial 
intelligence, in particular with vision systems for manufacturing as well as 
fields like autonomous motor vehicles. (Dr. Shashua previously founded 
Mobileye, a corporation that supplies camera technology to the automobile 
industry that  can recognize objects like pedestrians and bicyclists and can 
keep a car in a lane on a freeway.)
Speech recognition is now routinely used by tens of millions of people on 
both iPhones and Android smartphones. Moreover, natural language processing 
is  making it possible for computer systems to "read" documents, which is 
having a significant impact in the legal field, among others.
There are now at least six competing approaches in the field of computer 
vision.
For example, researchers at Google and elsewhere have begun using what are 
known as "deep learning" techniques that attempt to mimic biological vision 
systems.
However, they require vast computing resources for accurate recognition.
In contrast, the OrCam technique, which was described in a technical paper 
in 2011 by the Hebrew University researchers, offers a reasonable trade-off 
between recognition accuracy and speed. The technique, known as Shareboost, 
is distinguished by the fact that as the number of objects it needs to 
recognize grows, the system minimizes the amount of additional computer 
power  required.
"The challenges are huge," said Dr. Wexler, a co-author of the paper and 
vice president of research and development at OrCam. "People who have low 
vision  will continue to have low vision, but we want to harness computer 
science to help  them."
Additionally the OrCam system is designed to have a minimal control system, 
or user interface. To recognize an object or text, the wearer simply points 
at  it with his or her finger, and the device then interprets the scene.
The system recognizes a pre-stored set of objects and allows the user to add 
to its library - for example, text on a label or billboard, or a stop light 
or street sign - by simply waving his or her hand, or the object, in the 
camera's field of view.
One of the key challenges, Dr. Shashua said, was allowing quick optical 
character recognition in a variety of lighting conditions as well as on 
flexible surfaces.
"The professional optical character readers today will work very well when 
the image is good, but we have additional challenges - we must read text on 
flexible surfaces like a hand-held newspaper," he said.
Although the system is usable by the blind, OrCam is initially planning to 
sell the device to people in the United States who are visually impaired, 
which  means that their vision cannot be adequately corrected with glasses.
In the United States, 21.2 million people over the age of 18 have some kind 
of visual impairment, including age-related conditions, diseases and birth 
defects, according to the 2011 National Health Survey by the U.S. National 
Center for Health Statistics. OrCam said that worldwide there were 342 
million adults  with significant visual impairment, and that 52 million of 
them had middle-class incomes.
Source URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/science/israeli-start-up-gives-visually-impaired-a-way-to-read.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0


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