간판, 표지판등의 text를 데이타로 활용하자는 의견.
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-08-05-n35.html
How Image-to-Text Could Be Used in Google Street View
Google Street View’s photo data could be used for more than just plain showing it to users. Internally, Google could do some image analysis – like OCR, optical character recognition, to convert text contained in the images of the houses, shops and so on to text. Such text could be utilized for several things:
- Google could be able to make the streets searchable through a normal text input box. If a club is called “Foobar” and you enter “foobar”, you may find the location even if it’s not available from any existing yellow pages overview service.
- It could be possible to overlay text on the images with translations, should you want to. For instance, when you’re browsing the newly released panorama photos for Tokyo, Japan, you may be curious what this or that street sign means. (In turn, such translated meta data could also be made searchable again... so that if you look for a shoe shop in Tokyo, you don’t need to use the Japanese word for “shoes” to search, but just enter something in English.)
- Depending on Google’s resolution of photo data – the resolution they show off publicly may not be reflecting what they store internally – they may be able to analyze menus of restaurants, price tags of products in shop windows and more. With some tweaking this could possibly be used to calculate the expensiveness of certain neighborhoods, show what type of food is available in a restaurant, show what brands a shop sells and more.
Besides OCR, Google could also analyze non-textual objects in their images. While that may may be tough to do we need to keep in mind they already successfully manage to determine faces (in order to blur them, due to privacy concerns). One thing that should thus be solvable would be, for instance, to count the people in a street to roughly see how busy an area is. What other information do you think could be mined out of Google Street View imagery in the future?
[Image from Google Street View, Tokyo, with contrast adjusted.]
http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2008/08/could_streetview_imagery_be_used_to.html
August 14, 2008
Could StreetView imagery be used to enhance Google Maps accuracy?
- Simply make the maps more accurate. If you can read an address off of a building, or the name of a business, you'd know exactly where to place the pin in Google Maps.
- Make text searchable. Even if a new location wasn't in Google Maps yet, you could still help people find it if they searched for the right keywords.
- Overlay translations. If you are browsing a location that isn't in your native language, Google could overlay translations of the words found in the photos.
- If Google could update the imagery more often, you could find sales, job openings and other tidbits like that. I can't imagine they could update it that quickly, but you never know what might happen a few years down the road.
Other suggestions from the Blogoscoped forums include inserting ads (maybe even overwriting billboards), or using face-detection to try to identify criminals. I think Google would face some serious opposition to the second idea (and maybe the first), but it's interesting to see the ideas that people come up with.
The tricky part to this is obviously the OCR. You've got relatively low-quality photos (at least that's what they show us), taken with a wide variety of light, at different angles, different fonts, etc. It wouldn't be easy. However, applications like Evernote with its amazing OCR can give us some hope. Google certainly has the technology and the horsepower to get this done, but I wonder if they'll try it or not?
What other cool things could Google do with this if they decided to implement it?
Mickey
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