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A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

countthings.com

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Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

#61

Post by cesis »

choeger wrote: post #21

Couldn't they use a machine like a coin counter?

There exists an entire industry for counting and sorting things(e.g. optical bean sorting).

There also are rather cheap optical tachometers(measuring rotations by applying reflective tape on rotating surface). I would guess such devices could also be tailored for counting falling objects.

And also there are multiple old- school tricks for similar tasks. E.g. if you need to count nails, weight them all, then weight a single nail, then divide the weights to get count.

Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

#62

Post by matsemann »

morsanu wrote: post #42
flukus wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think this is an important point. It doesn't have to be "machines took my job". When I helped automate/streamline a government welfare program, it didn't mean case workers suddenly were without a job. It meant they could spend less time clicking on a computer, and more time doing the important human to human stuff and provide better care.

Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

#64

Post by matsemann »

jarenmf wrote: post #4

They are using an app https://countthings.com/ This seems rather a simple task, however, the app is expensive ($100 per month per device) and limited with the templates for things it can count [1]. [1] https://countthings.com/en/counting-templates

Do you know the true cost of a developer? When they are already hired they may seem free, but in practice that $100 dollars is probably less than hour worth of time.

Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

#65

Post by Noumenon72 »

morsanu wrote: post #14

Hi, there! I'm one of the project managers at CountThings, I'll try to respond to comments here but I guess you can AMA.

I just wanted to say that if you can count particles of things in microscope images, you can probably make great inroads at companies that do drug testing, like Covance or PPD in America. They're paying chemists to circle blobs on paper and count them. I bet they'd even appreciate someone to count their circles!

Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

#66

Post by talliedthoughts »

joosters wrote: post #30
jarenmf wrote: post #4

They are using an app https://countthings.com/ This seems rather a simple task, however, the app is expensive ($100 per month per device) and limited with the templates for things it can count [1]. [1] https://countthings.com/en/counting-templates

Some of those counting templates are very niche, which makes it intriguing to think of who is using them. For instance, there is a 'Movie Tickets' counter, but it's not counting paper tickets. Instead, the example photo looks like a screenshot of a 'pick your seats' page from a theatre's booking process. So who is doing the counting here? It can't be the theatre, as they would already know the numbers. So is the cust…

Financial analysts trying to figure out if AMC are gonna hit their quarterly numbers?

Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

#68

Post by Scea91 »

temporalparts wrote: post #6

Wow, 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/

The difficulty of this depends on the acceptance criteria. I can imagine that the industrial requirements for FP/FN count make this quite an interesting and complicated problem.

Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls

#69

Post by dintech »

joosters wrote: post #37
morsanu wrote: post #14

Hi, there! I'm one of the project managers at CountThings, I'll try to respond to comments here but I guess you can AMA.

How accurate is the counting? For examples like the case study, I presume your customers will want very close to 100% accuracy, but many other use cases will only need rough numbers. How do you calibrate / verify your app?

One thing to consider is that humans don't have 100% accuracy for large numbers of things.
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