This is an advertisement / press release, which is fine, but should be disclosed as such in the HN title.
A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
181–190 of 236 posts
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#182Hi, 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?
The article shows a photo with the pearls highlighted with circles. I'm generally skeptical of AI, but this system produces a certificate that a human can verify much faster than doing the work themselves. IMO, that's the right way to do it. You can trust the system 99% of the time, and check a random 1% by eye every day. Or, you can keep a human fully in the loop and still save time (though, if the error rate is too low, humans will get bored)
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#183Wow, 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/
There's no ML here. This is a decades old software technology being packaged as a phone app.
The much better cameras help a lot, I guess. I remember scanning QR codes with a 2014 and a 2018 (yeah, already old) flagship phone and being amazed at the distance the latter was able to do it from. At least 3x the distance from the QR code vs the old model, and the autofocus was near instant, too.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#184> 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.
People often don't know what's really needed by businesses until they see the use case. I remember 2 decades ago a family friend making fun of his son's project where they identified bad apples on a processing line in a packing facility. Pretty close to this project. He saw it and still didn't get it.
Next, an app to identify bad apples heh
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
But is there any barrier to entry though? By the looks of it, none, the next app will charges $5 per month and it could even be generic ('round objects counter')
It may not seem like it to those of us who know how to do it, but there actually is quite a barrier to entry. You or an organization needs to have the skills to utilize machine learning algorithms, test them thoroughly, package it in an easy-to-use application, then market it and compete against competitors. Just ask your every day Joe what you should do with a learning rate if your error rate suddenly spikes or how…
I also think part of the "real skill" in this sort of business is making sure you have someone around when it breaks. If the pearl counting algo goes haywire, the pearl company wants to know that they'll have someone to contact to fix it.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is not it something anyone can do for free using image J with a bit of scripting.
If you have the skills, you should definitely try it. We have a full team working on this for about 7 years. Constant improvements to our algorithms, new challenges, new technologies. A ton of other functionalities besides counting (e.g. forms, reports, integration). A lot of work on the backend, UX. Also, a lot of sales and marketing involved.
It is impressive you do it so fast. In case you have not thinked about it, some people will be interested by it in life sciences. Best I could do with the picture available on your website https://imgur.com/a/FKEkiFz compared to https://countthingsqanda.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/5-17... I got some wrong counts but the picture is really tiny to work with.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps it has to do with different interpretations of what is meant by best? If I told you the best Thai place around where I live, I would tell you a place that is best not just because of its food, but also its price, parking, distance to travel. It is the best in that it is the most optimal given my own value judgment of those factors.
This is exactly right. Before I lived in Seattle, I was told (moving from the southwest), that there was no good Mexican food in Seattle. Of course after I moved there I found quite a number of excellent Mexican food restaurants, and for a few years I wondered what strange definition they were using. I eventually figured out that they meant that there was no good Mexican food within walking distance of downtown
Do you have any recs in North Seattle? Me and my wife live in Lake City and have been looking for a good (need not be the best ;) ) Mexican place.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s also a technique called “weighing”. It’s a transformation which, by assuming the items are identical, turns quantity from a discrete value to a continuous one with some loss of precision. In many cases measurement times can be reduced my more than 99%.
I think you're not wrong. Even if the pearls aren't identical, if you weigh enough of them at once the central limit theorem will be on your side.
Maybe I misunderstand, but I don't think you meant central limit theorem.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
We are working on this product in-house for 7 years now. We are an internal startup from a company that does custom computer vision and ML software. No mturk, no tricks, a lot of work in ML and in UX as it is not a very straightforward task.
Wasn't trying to trivialise your work! Just offering some ideas of the basic ways this could be tackled. Sorry if you thought I was trivialising it, the intent was more to support the idea that modern DL can still provide solutions with relatively simple methods.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're not wrong. Even if the pearls aren't identical, if you weigh enough of them at once the central limit theorem will be on your side.
Maybe I misunderstand, but I don't think you meant central limit theorem.
I did indeed. Your pearls might be heterogenous, but they will probably have an average weight that doesn't change much over time. The central limit theorem makes it possible to estimate quite accurately how much you have of a sum quantity including having a somewhat known accuracy of that estimate, since you get a nice normal distribution with known mean and variance.