It has been 36 years since an experimental robotic arm poured punch on itself during a cocktail party at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. At the time, the Stanford computer scientists had a good laugh at the expense of their hapless waiter. Its overworked processor had fallen behind the pace of its primitive vision system.
Giving machines the ability to "see" is an endeavor that has evolved considerably since then -- most famously, perhaps, in the case of the Sojourner exploratory craft that guided itself over the surface of Mars in 1997.
And now, across town from the scene of the failed punch bowl experiment, a former Stanford graduate student's company, Tyzx, is working on computer-vision technology that is meant to be sufficiently sophisticated, but inexpensive enough, to find its way into everyday applications.
Examples might include an inexpensive swimming pool alarm system that would see when small children wandered too near the water and alert their parents. Or a video game that might permit two people to simulate a boxing match, remotely.
And with public security a pressing concern these days, surveillance systems capable of spotting suspects in a crowd might be of interest to law-enforcement agencies -- whatever the Big Brother issues.
"We are able to do three-dimensional imaging quickly and cheaply and at very low power," said Dr. John Woodfill, 42, a computer scientist who is a co-founder of Tyzx and who has been working on the technology since 1990, when he was a graduate student.
Like other companies intent on finding commercial applications for machines that can see, Tyzx (rhymes with physics) is benefiting from the inexorable trend of ever-cheaper, increasingly powerful silicon chips.
"Real-time 3D vision systems have been something the computer vision field has been dreaming about since the 1960s," said Eric Grimson, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It's taken a long time to get there."
If two of the people in the system hug one another, the Tyzx system can correctly track each individual when they separate.
The Tyzx vision system is based on stereo vision -- two closely spaced inexpensive video cameras linked by a high-speed data channel to a custom processing card in a standard personal computer.
The company is in the process of shrinking the entire system onto a single chip, an advance that would potentially bring real-time stereo vision to the masses.
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