Getting Up To Speed

To get people up to speed on Visipedia, I have collected a couple of links that they can check out:

http://vision.ucsd.edu/project/visipedia

http://visipedia.org/

Basically you can imagine Visipedia to be an augmented version of Wikipedia, where you can perform searches with images instead of text. The "poster child" example of Visipedia would be the following:

Imagine you just took a picture of a bird from your back yard or while you were hiking. You would now like to know some more information about the bird in your image. With "current technology" this leaves you with several options.

• Option 1: Type some stuff into the Google search bar and hope for the best...
• Option 2: Go to a website like whatbird.com
• Option 3: Crack open that 10 year old field guide and hope you don't make a mistake when following the instructions, otherwise you will be leafing back and forth until you convince yourself that you took a picture of a penguin in so-cal...

To be fair, "current technology" has gotten us by, but that does not mean we should be happy with the status quo. Enter Visipedia. Instead of typing a text description of the bird into a Google search bar, a user of Visipedia would be able to drag their picture of the bird from their desk top into the search bar, submit their query, and like magic information regarding the bird in their image would come up. No text descriptions, no field guides, nothing but the image.

A lot of work still needs to be done before the above example can become a reality. My project for CSE 190 will be to construct an interface for Visipedia on iOS devices. The main focus will be on the development of a clean, flexible code base that will lay the foundation for a full version of Visipedia. For now, the application will be geared towards the category of birds. An emphasis will be placed on testing different UI designs in order to understand how users will best interact with Visipedia. The Apple mobile devices offer a unique opportunity to allow the user to interact with the recognition algorithms in a very positive and natural manner. This human interaction will greatly assist the recognition algorithms, making them useful well before they are capable of operating without human assistance. Leveraging the touch interface of the devices to make the Visipedia experience fun and intuitive will be a key aspect of this project, one that will hopefully shed light on the future full implementations of Visipedia.