The eyePhone -A Brilliant Space-Technology Morph

Would you like instant access to information on the Vatican or Florence and scenery you see on your travels through Europe? A new mobile phone system, able to provide information on what you see when you see it, was a regional winner in the European Satellite Navigation Competition, sponsored by ESA's Technology Transfer Program.

This novel use of satellite technology combines three technologies: satellite navigation localization services, advanced object recognition and relevant internet retrieved information.
 

"The eye-Phone is a good illustration of the potential of satellite navigation systems when their positioning information is combined with other communication and information technology. With the improved accuracy of the European Galileo system in comparison to existing systems, the prospects will be amazing," says Frank M. Salzgeber, head of ESA’s Technology Transfer Program Office. "Galileo can create new businesses in Europe and strengthen Europe’s competitiveness in space spin-offs."

The system has been developed using Apollo technology, an innovative artificial intelligence system. "It's a unique piece of software that can carry out object recognition within images, a very tricky task. It is self-learning and after a short and very simple training session it can identify any object in the world," says creator Ernst Pechtl. "The key to the eye-Phone system is the object recognition done by the Apollo software. Nothing in the world is able to do what our software does."

Apollo technology can identify objects in a digital image regardless of the angle from which it is taken, the lighting conditions or quality of the image. To support object recognition, it uses navigation positioning information.

It uses also an ‘angle-sensor’, a new function now being introduced in digital cameras that identifies the angle from which an image is taken and the direction in which the camera is pointing. Once the object in the picture is recognized the system can then interface to any database on the internet to select user-specific information on the object selected.

Posted by Casey Kazan.

 

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Source link:

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/TTP2/SEMK2B3XQEF_0.html