philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

MIT machine vision system figures out what it’s looking at by itself

The DON or "Dense Object Nets" is a novel form of machine vision developed at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). It generates a "visual roadmap" -- basically, collections of visual data points arranged as coordinates. The system will also stitch each of these individual coordinate sets together into a larger coordinate set, the same way your phone can mesh numerous photos together into a single panoramic image. This enables the system to better and more intuitively understand the object's shape and how it works in the context of the environment around it.

That is, the DON system will allow a robot to look at a cup of coffee, properly orient itself to the handle, and realize that the bottom of the mug needs to remain pointing down when the robot picks up the cup to avoid spilling its contents. What's more, the system will allow a robot to pick a specific object out of a pile of similar objects.

Best of all, the system trains itself. There's no need to feed the AI hundreds upon thousands of images of an object to the DON in order to teach it. If you want the system to recognize a brown boot, you simply put the robot in a room with a brown boot for a little while. The system will automatically circle the boot, taking reference photos which it uses to generate the coordinate points, then trains itself based on what it's seen. The entire process takes less than an hour.

The technology is still in its infancy, so don't hold your breath for robot maids to empty your dishwasher any time soon. But eventually, Manuelli hopes that these machines, with their improved eyesight and coordination, become a member of your (ware)household.

See the full story here: https://www.engadget.com/2018/09/10/mit-machine-vision-DON-system-robot/