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Image recognition connects 19th and 21st century communications


The U.K.'s Royal Mail is offering a special stamp that can be recognized by a phone app to play unique content. The Great British Railways "intelligent stamp" has a picture of a classic steam engine. When an Android or iPhone app created by Junaio recognizes the stamp via the phone's camera, a video of Bernard Cribbins reading W.H. Auden’s poem The Night Mail plays on the phone.

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Tartalo robot recognizes doors from handles


Researchers at the University of Basque Country (Spain) have developed a robot that can detect doors based on their handles, even though door handles have many different forms. The robot, named Tartalo, then knocks on the door and asks for someone to open it. The project is focused on home applications for the disabled and elderly. More information is available in a Basque Research article.

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Priceview Auctions to add visual search for car buying


According to a press release, Priceview Auctions is planning to introduce a site for purchasing new autos that will incorporate visual search technology. The press release references Google's recent acquisition of Like.com as an "example" of activity in the field of visual search and says that Priceview will "also partially [rely] on the new visual search technology."

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MobileASL extends study on mobile video phones


According to a CNET news article, the MobileASL team is planning to launch a larger study on how deaf and hearing-impaired people in the United States use mobile video phones. The researchers are currently working on a compression scheme for sign language, with data rates at 30 kilobytes per second.

Related articles:
Cornell researchers develop mobile sign language app

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High speed computer vision tracks Cyborg Fly


IEEE Spectrum has a report on the Cyborg Fly project at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. A fly tethered in front of an LED display driven from a mobile robot's sensors steers that robot through an obstacle course. A high-speed vision system is used to analyze the motion of the fly's wings at 7 kilohertz; the analyzed wing dynamics provide steering commands to the robot. Although the purpose of the research was to analyze flight control in insects, the demands of the wing tracking led to the development of the high speed vision system.

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Desk lamp enhances multitouch table top display


Dr. Li-Wei Chan and researchers from National Taiwan University (NTU) have developed a lamp that enhances interactivity on a multitouch table display. The lamp has infrared cameras to see hidden markers to compute its position in three dimensions. The calculated position would control how it projects additional high-resolution information onto correct places on the multitouch table top. More information is available in a NewScientist article.

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Article in the The Independent cites computer vision as key technology


Steve Connor's article "How can Britain turn learning into lucre?", on the growth and importance of academic-industry partnerships, cites computer vision as one of the strengths of the Edinburgh Science Triangle partnership.

Editor's note: one of the goals of Computer Vision Central is to provide a common meeting place for computer vision in academia and in industry.

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MIT professor discovers new fast transforms for banded matrices


Dr. Gilbert Strang, an MIT math professor, has discovered a new way to split certain types of matrices into simpler ones. This can enable better video and audio compression and data processing. Results are published in a paper in the July issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. More information is available in a Dr. Dobb's article.

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Startup Kooaba secures $3 million venture funding


Techcrunch reported today that Kooaba, a Swiss image recognition company, has secured approximately US$3 million in a new round of venture capital. The startup, headed by Herbert Bay, is a spin-off from the ETH Zurich Computer Vision Lab. The funding will be used to hire new staff, expand partnerships, and enter new countries.

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EFF condemns Apple's "traitorware" technology


The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a watchdog group for digital privacy issues, has issued a statement condemning Apple's exploration of what EFF calls "traitorware." According to the EFF statement, Apple has filed a patent application on technology that would allow Apple to take pictures of an iPhone user without the knowledge of the user and send them back to Apple.

In addition to images, voice and even heartbeats could also be surreptitiously recorded and transmitted. According to EFF, the technology would allow Apple to disable phones that the user has legally modified in ways that Apple does not want.

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