[blindlaw] NY Times - Device from Israeli Start-Up gives Visually Impaired a Way to Read

[Michael Fry]

Wow!! that is really awesome.  If the price comes down, I'm going to buy
one.


On Tue, Jun 4, 2013 at 5:20 PM, Sy Hoekstra <sy.hoekstra at gmail.com> wrote:

> While the headline makes the story seem not particularly news-worthy, a new
> company in Israel has come up with what seems like a pretty cool new device
> to help visually impaired people read and recognize a whole range of stuff
> with a tiny camera clipped to glasses as opposed to a smart phone or some
> other device. The article is pasted below, and the link has a demo video.
> This could be cool, especially if they work out the kinks and the price
> drops.
>
>
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/science/israeli-start-up-gives-visually-im
> paired-a-way-to-read.html?emc=eta1&_r=0
>
>
>
> Device From Israeli Start-Up Gives the Visually Impaired a Way to Read
>
>
>
> 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  <http://www.orcam.com/> 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
> <
> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/15/health/fda-approves-technology-to-give-li
> mited-vision-to-blind-people.html> 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  <
> http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~shashua/>
> 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,
> <http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~shais/> 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
> <http://mcgovern.mit.edu/principal-investigators/tomaso-poggio> 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
> <
> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/28/science/on-the-road-in-mobileyes-self-dri
> ving-car.html?pagewanted=all> 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
> <http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.0820> 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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