The really fun challenge, is counting how many distinct domains countthings is using for their promotion. You probably need to use Hyperloglog :)
After you complete the challenge, I'll give you the correct answer.
Hint: not that many.
A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
41–50 of 236 posts
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This seems rather a simple task, however, the app is expensive It's easy to do it in an unreliable way. 1000$ a year doesn't seem very expensive if your business depends on it and you're saving a lot of time like in the OP. > and limited with the templates for things it can count It seems very specialized towards certain businesses, if you have a specific use case that isn't covered I'm guessing you can probably co…
> Before they started using CountThings from Photos, counting pearls took almost 100 hours a year. After installing this app, the time needed for counting pearls has been reduced by 80%. It takes only 20 hours now. Depending on what the salary is it barely breaks even, it's saving 2 working weeks a year. Depending how spread out the process is it might not even be time that can be put into something else, if it only…
Besides the cost cutting, keep in mind that the employees that don't have to manually count are not getting fired. They are providing more and better client services.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#43Why is an advertisement on the top spot on hacker news? Clearly as it has gotten more popular, the need for filtering has gone up.
I mean, it is missing any technical background. This is a basic puff piece of content written to promote their site. This should never have gotten on the site.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#44> All good apps have already been created. There is no room for innovation.
> Hold my beer:
> I made an app that counts.
Honestly, the simplicity of the idea is amazing.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#45To counter other’s points on pricing - in the end it’s a question of utility vs price. 1k$ per year to cut time to count by 80% may be a great deal to many.
Of course, but $100 per year to do the same is an even better deal. I can only assume that their support for custom requests is absolutely incredible, because it should be pretty trivial for any potential competitor to put up a similar concept for a tenth of the price and still be making a profit. But that's always the case with enterprise software I suppose. The improvement from 98% to 100% "quality" (whatever that…
This was my first thought: I could do this in half a day.
Then you look at their site and all the domains of application. My guess is they probably use a variety of models to get 100%: edge detection, CNN-style object detection, all sorts. And then aggregate/choose between the resulting predictions. Then they will probably have some layers of geometrical estimators.
The challenge here is 100% and on a wide variety of images. They'll need to maintain and collect data across a lot of domains, and find ways of coping with non-ideal ("in the field") input.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course, but $100 per year to do the same is an even better deal. I can only assume that their support for custom requests is absolutely incredible, because it should be pretty trivial for any potential competitor to put up a similar concept for a tenth of the price and still be making a profit. But that's always the case with enterprise software I suppose. The improvement from 98% to 100% "quality" (whatever that…
I absolutely expect this to be harder than it looks. If it was easy Google lens would do it. I had a similar shock when trying to do OCR from photos of receipts.
Google Lens isn't going to include a menu item for every single computer vision task with a simple specialized solution.
OpenCV provides circle detection out of the box: https://docs.opencv.org/3.4/d4/d70/tutorial_hough_circle.htm... The only part that's somewhat difficult is tuning the parameters correctly. I've found setting all thresholds very low (generating lots of false positives) and then culling overlap to work very well when I had to count individual atoms in electron microscopy images a few years ago.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there any alternatives? Or how one should approach making an app from scratch?
The old method used to be template matching, and it probably still works well enough for problems like this. There are almost certainly now better approaches possible using Machine Learning. In my experience, the main challenges with problems like this are dealing with varying lighting, scales, orientation and perspective. These can quickly become of diminishing returns – especially if the solution is provided as an…
My bet is they just invested a few months making a varied dataset, a few grand on mturk using labelme, some image augmentation, a few engineering tricks for a nice UX,some strategies for getting the model to converge on tricky test images, and got it to hit 100% accuracy fairly quickly.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#48Wow, this is such a simple application of ML and it is incredibly valuable. On their website, they charge $100/month per device or $1000/year per device [0] and I bet they're making a killing. [0] https://countthings.com/en/
Meanwhile industrial manufacturing have been using vision systems for years to count and inspect items. This solution is waaaaay cheaper than what other alternative packages are.
They could probably get away with charging a lot more if they build a lite assembly line style counter that takes in a video feed. (They might already have this, I didn’t look too much into it).
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#49Couldn't they use a machine like a coin counter?
I'm no expert, but I believe Pearl is quite easy to scuff/scratch.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#50Wow, this is such a simple application of ML and it is incredibly valuable. On their website, they charge $100/month per device or $1000/year per device [0] and I bet they're making a killing. [0] https://countthings.com/en/
Meanwhile industrial manufacturing have been using vision systems for years to count and inspect items. This solution is waaaaay cheaper than what other alternative packages are. They could probably get away with charging a lot more if they build a lite assembly line style counter that takes in a video feed. (They might already have this, I didn’t look too much into it).
They can also count items from video https://youtu.be/EoCMUfMO2jw