Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having an US office is due to business needs?
Our CEO is from the US.
So... he went to Romania for setting all up there?
A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
211–220 of 236 posts
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
LOL you're not getting this done trivially with OpenCV. https://countthings.com/en/counting-templates
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 :)
I still wouldn't consider this trivial. It takes a good bit of playing around with parameters like radius range and filters to consistently get all and only real circles. Even under ideal conditions, it's probably more than an hour of trial and error, and it's very easy for a layman to not fully understand why they're not getting the result they wanted. I'm no expert on jewelry but I imagine even a 0.1% error rate would be quite expensive, and that level of performance would be a real challenge for even someone very experienced with opencv.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
El Camion taco truck on Sand Point way is pretty good
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They could even make people count them by hand!
Well no that wouldn't be fully automatic. A counting machine that just funnels the pearls through a switch is simple, automatic, non-patent encumbered, and cheap.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Value pricing at it's finest. If the customer saves $1000/month per device, they'll happily pay the $100/month. As it still saves them $900. They don't care how complex/simple the ML implementation is.
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')
I imagine it's all in the business development. I for one never would have thought to reach out to pearl traders to service their counting needs, and odds are they're not actively seeking out computer vision expertise.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#216Nobody 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.
I'm planning on sending this link over to our warehouse guys. We sell containers of many small things.
And... I could probably build something like this. Not as nice. And not in four hours. It'd take more than four hours of meetings to get it started. The app's price is well worth it, if we can work it into our processes.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#217I 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…
LOL you're not getting this done trivially with OpenCV. https://countthings.com/en/counting-templates
amassing a library of scripts for various shapes is time-consuming, true.
however few of those templates do anything that openCV can't be massaged to do well, too.
Given that people are likely going to use only a few of the templates that they find useful for their own work, I find it hard to be able to find the value in paying 100/mo for a massive library filled with techniques that aren't useful for my particular work plus a UI with some polish.
Not only that , but counting stuff in the work place is often done as part of a process; it's dead easy to pipe openCV output into any system that might need to be aware of the count; it's not quite as easy with 'Counting Things' without a human in the loop.
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about others, but because a lot of IT news comes to me from American medias, I _always_ consider it hype. The reason is cultural: american can't seem to do without superlatives. They didn't eat good carrots yesterday, there were AMAZING carrots. They don't introduce me to their friends, but to their VERY BEST friends. They are always EXCITED to do X and SO something about Y. The result is that none of th…
> The reason is cultural: american can't seem to do without superlatives. They didn't eat good carrots yesterday, there were AMAZING carrots. They don't introduce me to their friends, but to their VERY BEST friends. They are always EXCITED to do X and SO something about Y. It's INCREDIBLY annoying.
Selection bias, perhaps? They're not telling you at all about the regular carrots, the okay friends, because why should they waste your time with "It's just the same old same old."
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#219I 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
Maybe in USA/Canada. In a lot of Europe, you’re getting sealed boxes. Often without any stickers applied.
7 day course? Here’s two boxes of 5. Do what you do with the last 3. A lot of homes are basically supermarkets of unused meds.
Though there are plenty of counting machines nowadays.
Here’s a primitive version from the UK:
Re: A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
#220When a player rolls 38 6-sided dice in a tabletop game, I'd like to have something similar.