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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

#81

Post by smichel17 »

distribot wrote: post #74
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/

I wish I could get a bead on how useful ML is. Hackernews makes me think it’s all hype.

The main reason I'm trying to cut down on my HN consumption a bit is the incessant pessimism. While a regular reality check is definitely useful, the "I'm so jaded by everything" vibe makes it hard to get excited about anything. I like being excited by things! It feels good and motivates me. Too much HN is a recipe for lethargy.

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

#82

Post by toyg »

distribot wrote: post #74
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/

I wish I could get a bead on how useful ML is. Hackernews makes me think it’s all hype.

As usual, there are exaggerations on both sides. ML is genuinely useful for moderately complex problems like this one, and pretty rubbish for a bunch of other stuff it's been shoehorned on. There is no silver bullet, as usual.

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

#83

Post by jiofih »

fimdomeio wrote: post #77

Humans on the other hand are really good at looking at patterns. I imagine a tray with some recesses that would receive the pearls after a bit of shaking or a funnel that would put all the pearls in a line and then somehow group them/count them should not be that hard to do. And yes outsourcing this to someone else and employing machine learning apparently also works.

No need to imagine, there’s a picture of that tray right at the top of the article.

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

#84

Post by dan-robertson »

fimdomeio wrote: post #77

Humans on the other hand are really good at looking at patterns. I imagine a tray with some recesses that would receive the pearls after a bit of shaking or a funnel that would put all the pearls in a line and then somehow group them/count them should not be that hard to do. And yes outsourcing this to someone else and employing machine learning apparently also works.

I think that was the old solution: they have a large tray with 100 slots and a bar which allows for multiples of 10 to be counted. The digits are done manually. The problem was that pearls could fall out of the tray and, as they are round, roll around on the floor taking up to 30m to find. It is a mechanism for counting out a specified number rather than determining how many are in a bag, which may be more limited. Another problem was that if workers forgot the partial sum, they would need to start again.

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

#85

Post by danielheath »

malpighien wrote: post #79
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.

Is not it something anyone can do for free using image J with a bit of scripting.

Is this a bad time to remind HN of that famous comment on the founding of dropbox?

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

#86

Post by avibhu »

In a an image with sufficient contrast between the foreground and the background, thresholding and using the fast radial symmetry transform[1] should do the trick. I have some really old code that I wrote a few years back that does something similar. I was able to use the same algorithm for counting objects in images captured from a Neubauer chamber [2] and saved countless man hours at my university.

Disclaimer: the project is really old, and from a time when I barely knew how to code. Lots of bad coding practices et al.

Github: https://github.com/vibhuagrawal14/segmentation-of-overlappin...

[1] https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F3-540-47969-...

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Images-of-Canis-familiar...

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

#87

Post by toyg »

matsemann wrote: post #62
morsanu wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't have to, but eventually it will. At the first inevitable downturn, jobs that get cut in a newly-automated field will never come back.

People are creative, we will find new things to do (particularly as more and more people will get taught automation and coding in school, making them tech-adaptable for life, as opposed to the "boomer" generations who were often fundamentally tech-averse), but let's not kid ourselves that technology isn't burning away a bunch of jobs.

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

#88

Post by bonoboTP »

distribot wrote: post #74
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/

I wish I could get a bead on how useful ML is. Hackernews makes me think it’s all hype.

Depends on your baseline excitement. If you're so hyped up that you think it can classify bad and good prospective employees from a single photo, you should tone it down because that's nonsense. If you think it's all fluff, then you are also wrong. There are many great ML applications for constrained scenarios.

But this pearl counting does not require modern ML at all. It can be done with decades old image processing algorithms like Canny edge detection, Hough transform, thresholding, Hu moments etc. How reliably is another question. This kind of stuff is/used to be called "Machine Vision" (related to computer vision, but in hard industry they like to say machine vision).

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

#89

Post by jopsen »

krapht wrote: post #5
raverbashing wrote: post #3

Counting elements from pictures is how old again now? 20 years? 30 years? Sure, it's more reliable and you can run it on a phone. But maybe this could have been solved 20 years ago. (Yes, it might not have been as convenient, but for something that apparently is so important, it could have been applied earlier) Japan, a country which in the 80s was synonymous with technological innovation seems to have slowed down dr…

If you think old, unoptimized, high-human labor business processes exist only in Japan, have I got a bridge to sell to you.

Optimizing 100 hours per year to 20 hours isn't much either..

It's 3 days, for that to break even development costs have to very low.

Of course, selling it as a generic app for counting things is a great way to do this.

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

#90

Post by GistNoesis »

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/

Let's just hope their engineering teams in Romania and Vietman get a respectable share of the profits.
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