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I Need Help

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jdr

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I have an idea for a device but I have practically no knowledge about customizing a circuit board. I need to incorporate internal memory, an LCD display, a camera (the type used in cell phones).
Please, if someone could help I would greatly appreciate any advice or direction.
 
First understand the "I need help" is a very poor choice for a title.
The title is intended to describe the nature of your post so people can choose which posts to read based on that title.

Second it doubtful that you are going to get any help with the vague description you provided. There is no way you can keep your idea a secret and still get the kind of help your asking for.
 
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you're right, but at this point i started get frustrated so i suppose i wasn't thinking in depth. to be perfectly honest i know very little about these things. what i'm looking to create is a device with an internal photographic database/encyclopedia. the camera would be used photograph an object, that photograph would then be married with the built in information.. an example would be...i take a picture of a shoe...this device would then be able to tell me what kind of shoe.
 
It takes a lot of computer and fancy programming to tell the difference between types of shoes. You are not going to do it with a microcontroller.

Are you interested in microcontrollers in general or just this project ?

3v0

you're right, but at this point i started get frustrated so i suppose i wasn't thinking in depth. to be perfectly honest i know very little about these things. what i'm looking to create is a device with an internal photographic database/encyclopedia. the camera would be used photograph an object, that photograph would then be married with the built in information.. an example would be...i take a picture of a shoe...this device would then be able to tell me what kind of shoe.
 
from time to time i have ideas for things. i got this idea from a police facial recognition device...it would take a picture of the person's face, then go through a registry of convicts to see if that person was on file and if he/she has a warrant for their arrest. i like the idea of that, but used in a different way. what if i had just an internal memory that had a picture of every type of shoe...and when you take a picture of shoe X...it would look for shoe X in the internal memory of the device. wouldn't that work?
 
Same thing. You are still looking at visual recognition.

Your problem is much harder then the facial recognition. The facial recognition program can look at markers on the face and generate some sort of metric. But it never has to sort people into groups. It only looks for individuals. What you want to do would make a nice project for a doctoral canadiate. If not today just a few years back.

EDIT: Why are you interested in shoes ?

You came to the right place but you are asking to start at the top. How about spending the time to learn how to blink a LED with a uC, move on to LCD's. That sort of thing.

3v0

from time to time i have ideas for things. i got this idea from a police facial recognition device...it would take a picture of the person's face, then go through a registry of convicts to see if that person was on file and if he/she has a warrant for their arrest. i like the idea of that, but used in a different way. what if i had just an internal memory that had a picture of every type of shoe...and when you take a picture of shoe X...it would look for shoe X in the internal memory of the device. wouldn't that work?
 
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what if i took a panoramic image of certain objects and that way, no matter what angle, it would still have a basis of recognition. i know it can be done...i just don't know enough to do it myself..i need someone to team up with who has a more technical view point in terms of software and electronics.
 
I agree with 3v0. The hardware alone would be tough for a beginner. [Edit: Although most of the hardware could be purchased commercially, leaving the brunt of the work to be done in software.]

If you have a good background in programming, especially in visual processing, then perhaps an available facial recognition system could be modified or its API accessed at a low enough level to allow you to use it to ID shoes or other non-faces. The processing power needed will be hefty. I'd say have the portable device (containing the camera) wirelessly transmit the image to a PC for processing.

I also agree with 3v0 that this sounds like an advanced degree final project.


Torben
 
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well could i basically take the concept of sending a multi-media message via cell phone? meaning, i would take a picture of the object...send/search using something like wikipedia and then having that information given sent to the phone/device?
 
Recognition systems are very complex. You need to build a sophisticated model, break the target object (like a face) into a set of specific features, figure out how to encode the features into something that is searchable, build a library of objects and then do something like a fuzzy search against the library. You seem to be wanting to take a picture of an arbitrary object and recognize. You would have to reproduce something with the complexity and sophistication of the human brain.

Good luck.
 
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i'm not interested in shoes..i'm using that as an example.

I did not think you were.

me said:
Second it doubtful that you are going to get any help with the vague description you provided. There is no way you can keep your idea a secret and still get the kind of help your asking for.

Still you persist in hiding what you are attempting to do. I have been out of the AI field for a long time. But as far as I know, no one has such a general recognition system. If they did it would be on a large computer.

If you had a robot on a assembly line you could teach it to recognize specific parts, specific nuts and bolts in a fixed environment for example. But it only knows what you program it to know. To even talk about this intelligently we have to know what you want to recognize.

Most people think that an idea is worth a lot of money. That truth is unless you have the right marketing organization in place it is nearly worthless. People with good ideas have spent all their money and the money of anyone the could get to invest in attempts to market what seemed to be good products.
 
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