iVisit have recently just demoed their SeeScan technology which provides Real-Time Object Recognition on mobile devices. Before you wonder what this may be useful for it’s initially designed for visually impaired people to recognise objects.
iVisit SeeStar offers persons who are visually impaired access to a remote sighted assistant. Using a camera enabled PDA phone visually impaired users can transmit live video to remote assistants on a desktop computer who can in turn provide audio guidance to describe the user’s surroundings, pointing the location of salient landmarks, pathways to destinations, or locating and recognizing objects and signs. The live GPS position of the visually impaired user is also displayed on Google Maps, enabling the remote assistant to offer navigation guidance to points of interest or other location based information that can be overlaid on such GIS databases.
iVisit SeeScan increases the functional independence of visually impaired users by enabling them to access a state-of-the-art object recognition system to easily and quickly detect and recognize specific objects such as packaged goods, money, CDs, etc.
Here’s a video of SeeScan in action:
