[NFBMT] OrCam: From the New York Times

[Dar]

Now do I read this will help a total! 
I would want to make sure I still would use my skills. 
Or would you not trust the dog! 
Or correct when dog wishes to get into trouble. 
I love it when price is given we should jump and get it rite away! 

Dar
Every saint has a past, 
Every sinner has a future 


> On Mar 5, 2017, at 5:40 AM, Bruce&Joy Breslauer via NFBMT <nfbmt at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> 
> Israeli Start-Up Gives Visually Impaired a Way to Read - The New York Times
> 
> 
> 
> 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.
> 
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