dear all,
forwording this information wich i got from onother list.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ankit Jindal

scientist in Israel is developing this wonderful device, it may be
helpful for visually impairs.

....


Ms. Negrin, who has coloboma, a birth defect that perforates a
structure of the eye and afflicts about 1 in 10,000 people, is an
employee at OrCam, an Israeli start-up that has developed a
camera-based system intended to give the visually impaired the ability
to both “read” easily and move freely.

Until now reading aids for the visually impaired and the blind have
been cumbersome devices that recognize text in restricted
environments, or, more recently, have been software applications on
smartphones that have limited capabilities.

In contrast, the OrCam device is a small camera worn in the style of
Google Glass, connected by a thin cable to a portable computer
designed to fit in the wearer’s pocket. The system clips on to the
wearer’s glasses with a small magnet and uses a bone-conduction
speaker to offer clear speech as it reads aloud the words or object
pointed to by the user.

The system is designed to both recognize and speak “text in the wild,”
a term used to describe newspaper articles as well as bus numbers, and
objects as diverse as landmarks, traffic lights and the faces of
friends.

It currently recognizes English-language text and beginning this week
will be sold through the company’s Web site for $2,500, about the cost
of a midrange hearing aid. It is the only product, so far, of the
privately held company, which is part of the high-tech boom in Israel.

The device is quite different from other technology that has been
developed to give some vision to people who are blind, like the
artificial retina system called Argus II, made by Second Sight Medical
Products. That system, which was approved by the Food and Drug
Administration in February, allows visual signals to bypass a damaged
retina and be transmitted to the brain.


By Amnon Shashua
Liat Negrin, an employee at OrCam who has limited sight, demonstrates
the Orcam device, which helps her cross streets, read menus and shop
at the supermarket.

The OrCam device is also drastically different from Google Glass,
which also offers the wearer a camera but is designed for people with
normal vision and has limited visual recognition and local computing
power.

OrCam was founded several years ago by Amnon Shashua, a well-known
researcher who is a computer science professor at Hebrew University
here. It is based on computer vision algorithms that he has pioneered
with another faculty member, Shai Shalev-Shwartz, and one of his
former graduate students, Yonatan Wexler.

“What is remarkable is that the device learns from the user to
recognize a new product,” said Tomaso Poggio, a computer scientist at
M.I.T. who is a computer vision expert and with whom Dr. Shashua
studied as a graduate student. “This is more complex than it appears,
and, as an expert, I find it really impressive.”

The advance is the result of both rapidly improving computing
processing power that can now be carried comfortably in a wearer’s
pocket and the computer vision algorithm developed by the scientists.

On a broader technology level, the OrCam system is representative of a
wide range of rapid improvements being made in the field of artificial
intelligence, in particular with vision systems for manufacturing as
well as fields like autonomous motor vehicles. (Dr. Shashua previously
founded Mobileye, a corporation that supplies camera technology to the
automobile industry that can recognize objects like pedestrians and
bicyclists and can keep a car in a lane on a freeway.)

Speech recognition is now routinely used by tens of millions of people
on both iPhones and Android smartphones. Moreover, natural language
processing is making it possible for computer systems to “read”
documents, which is having a significant impact in the legal field,
among others.

There are now at least six competing approaches in the field of
computer vision. For example, researchers at Google and elsewhere have
begun using what are known as “deep learning” techniques that attempt
to mimic biological vision systems. However, they require vast
computing resources for accurate recognition.

In contrast, the OrCam technique, which was described in a technical
paper in 2011 by the Hebrew University researchers, offers a
reasonable trade-off between recognition accuracy and speed. The
technique, known as Shareboost, is distinguished by the fact that as
the number of objects it needs to recognize grows, the system
minimizes the amount of additional computer power required.

“The challenges are huge,” said Dr. Wexler, a co-author of the paper
and vice president of research and development at OrCam. “People who
have low vision will continue to have low vision, but we want to
harness computer science to help them.”

Additionally the OrCam system is designed to have a minimal control
system, or user interface. To recognize an object or text, the wearer
simply points at it with his or her finger, and the device then
interprets the scene.

The system recognizes a pre-stored set of objects and allows the user
to add to its library — for example, text on a label or billboard, or
a stop light or street sign — by simply waving his or her hand, or the
object, in the camera’s field of view.

One of the key challenges, Dr. Shashua said, was allowing quick
optical character recognition in a variety of lighting conditions as
well as on flexible surfaces.

“The professional optical character readers today will work very well
when the image is good, but we have additional challenges — we must
read text on flexible surfaces like a hand-held newspaper,” he said.

Although the system is usable by the blind, OrCam is initially
planning to sell the device to people in the United States who are
visually impaired, which means that their vision cannot be adequately
corrected with glasses.

In the United States, 21.2 million people over the age of 18 have some
kind of visual impairment, including age-related conditions, diseases
and birth defects, according to the 2011 National Health Survey by the
U.S. National Center for Health Statistics. OrCam said that worldwide
there were 342 million adults with significant visual impairment, and
that 52 million of them had middle-class incomes.


A version of this article appeared in print on June 4, 2013, on page
A5 of the New York edition with the headline: Device From Israeli
Start-Up Gives The Visually Impaired a Way to Read.

....
Ankit Jindal

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