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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

#201

Post by wavefunction »

varjag wrote: post #169
pokoleo wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article is perfectly within HN's audience! • Clever way to distribute "the future" to a niche/under-served audience • MVP (likely) buildable in a week/weekend • Marketing material demonstrating success • "This could be my passive income side project" appeal to bored tech company engineers It underlines the thesis in some patio11's content: > The future is here, it's just not widely distributed yet.

The thesis is originally from William Gibson.

Just for reference for those unfamiliar, William Gibson said "The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed"

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

#202

Post by cogman10 »

chrischen wrote: post #194
cogman10 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Count things isn't trivial, but this specific use case (counting circles) is trivial with opencv. I've done it myself making a robot follow a ball :)

Agree. Especially if you can control the image quality, background, etc, this can be done with less fancy methods. Heck, they probably don’t even need an image based solution. They could have also used mostly mechanical machines like how coin counters/sorters work, or used a bigger version of their old counting plate method but with detectors in each slot.

Background helps a lot, but if your things are relatively the same color, it's pretty easy to just filter out anything not within that color range and look for circles, even with an inconsistent background (though, admittedly it's harder).

That's effectively what I did with the ball tracking. I had a red ball and filtered out everything that wasn't roughly that shade. Certainly someone could have messed with me by wandering into frame with a red shirt :D

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

#203

Post by kyawzazaw »

ladyattis wrote: post #129

Okay, I'm not sure why people use software to do the work that hardware has solved decades ago. Like, I know that pearls come in various shapes, sizes, and weights but they're discrete objects. I would have assumed a simple machine similar to an egg counter would've already been on patent for such uses just for pearls. I mean the ML use case is still neat but I always feel that people always grab computers for the wr…

Hardware also has errors. This is a task of a keeping record, verification process.

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

#204

Post by kyawzazaw »

geoduck14 wrote: post #140
La1n wrote: post #57

Is ML here needed? When I was working in a lab we used the opensource ImageJ for counting cells. It seems like it'd do a great job here too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageJ

Yes. Yes. 1000 times YES! Why are we having this discussion? Why are people in HN amazed at this? What is wrong with the world where something like THIS is impressive?!?

Coz this company is making money. And the customer is satisified.

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

#205

Post by sbierwagen »

bellyfullofbac wrote: post #142

Nobody cares that this is just an ad? It's got too many paragraphs of bullshit filler for something that's basically "they're taking pictures and counting the pearls using machine learning".

I've got bad news for you regarding every other submission on HN.

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

#206

Post by joelthelion »

bellyfullofbac wrote: post #142

Nobody cares that this is just an ad? It's got too many paragraphs of bullshit filler for something that's basically "they're taking pictures and counting the pearls using machine learning".

Nobody here will buy their app; people are mostly interested in the idea and in the business model.

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

#207

Post by omar_kha »

jptech wrote: post #92
omar_kha wrote: post #91

so how would you go about doing this using ml? is it a classification problem? Count the number of instances. Or do we do deep learning and say here is a picture the result is 10?

Instance segmentation.

Thanks for this, maskrcnn looks like an interesting candidate

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

#209

Post by TchoBeer »

viraptor wrote: post #60
faebi wrote: post #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.

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.

To be fair, a machine that spots bad apples is rather useless, as by the time you spot them the whole bunch is already spoiled.

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

#210

Post by suifbwish »

Gaessaki wrote: post #154

I think what the CountThings app is doing is great. There are too many industries where tasks are being performed inefficiently due to a lack of applying readily available technology. They had the foresight to develop a product for a very common problem and make a business out of it. I’m a bit surprised that this is making the rounds of HN though. OpenCV and other computer vision libraries have trivialized such count…

Yet we still have humans counting pills in pharmacies
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