When I was first learning computer vision, I wrote a program that could tell the time from an image of a clock [1]. I had no purpose for it besides the fact that it seemed like a cool problem to try and solve. Years later, I get an email from a stranger in Korea, asking me how to run my program. Why would he want to use my silly program? Turns out you can adapt the code to read analog pressure gauges which is really…
Out of interest, how does this account for the orientation of the clock? Is it assuming 12 is always at the top, or is there some way it would work if the photo was somewhat rotated?
Yep, it does some naive rescaling of the clock to make it circular (since perspective would make it more like an ellipse in the image), but then assumes 12 is always at the top.