In Star Wars Rebels, there was an E-XD-series infiltrator droid that could quickly take inventory of everything in a rebel warehouse. With the advanced object recognition capabilities of modern AI, it’s only a matter of time before an app for Android can accurately and rapidly identify and store objects in real-time from video capture. This could be similar to a home inventory app where users only need to capture video and move around the house instead of taking pictures and labeling items. When do you think will there be an Android app for real-time visual inventory?
So, this is totally doable right now. The resolution and frame rates are there, AI being able to look at individual items on a screen and figure out what’s in the picture is already a mostly solved problem. It would probably make the most sense to turn the space into a 3D representation so you don’t accidentally double catch an item from a parallax error. It might not be able to tell the day TV is a frame versus a q LED, but it’ll be able to tell that it’s a 75-in TV and they can probably assign an average price to it.
The hard part is the horsepower required to do the AI work. It would need to be trained on pictures and sizes everything and of the things that are too complicated it would prompt you for what this item actually is. Lots of CPU, lots of GPU and would most likely need to head off to a beefy server farm where would need to spend a non-trivial amount of time sorting your stuff out.
Of course the real loser in all this is your insurance company. The less stuff you have on your inventory less stuff they pay out. To convince them too create the training data and host or pay for hosting the engines, There would have to be some clear advantage in it for them.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
This sort of exists. Amazon had unmanned convenience stores that used cameras to track purchases. Sam’s club had an inventory robot the last time I was there. It’s not star wars level tracking, but it’s somewhat close.