Nokia’s Point&Find Service.
During the lunchbreak I came across an interesting article in the internet. Nokia is going to launch next year an advertising service Point&Find. This service is based on the pattern-recognition technology. The owners of the mobile phones that are equiped with photo cameras will make photos of the subjucts, like CDs, they have an interest on. These photos will be then sent to the server to the pattern-recognition process. The proper subject will be filtered out from the database and the list of offers where to order and to buy this subject will be immediatly displayed to the user. Initially Point&Find service will be accessable only to the NOKIA owners, but later also to the owners of the other mobile phones. The only requirement will be Symbian OS.
In the later stages of development Nokia plans to support the pattern recognition from the crowd. So if you have the pictures of your friends in the profile, you’ll just need to make a photo of the stadium for example and you’ll know immediately who of your friends looks the football match at this stadium.
Frankly speaking I’m not well informed about the current state of the science, maybe there are already some more or less precise algorithms for pattern-recognition. But two years ago such service seemed to be a science fiction. Even this year I saw at the CeBit some software solutions, that tried to recognize subjects on the picture. But all of them used simple heuristics. For example there was a monitoring system from IBM. You can ask this programm to show you videos where there was a movement. Or where the cars drove before the camera. Or where the camera “saw” a man in red trouses. Year, it’s impressive, but the only thing that this monitoring system does is the analysis of the colors. In the example with a car there changes about 10 percent of the colors and the car moves quickly. The man in red trouses can be mistaken for a red fire drancher. So I’m a little bit sceptic about the quality of Nokia’s Point&Find Service. Let’s see.