Light my camera, say: Descriptive Camera

How does a regular camera work? Brought, pressed the button, got the result. Modern gadgets allow you to add a lot of metadata to the received photo, including the coordinates of the photographing location.
But so far no camera was able to add textual descriptions of what is in the photo to photos. Now he can.



The Descriptive Camera prototype, matching its name using the crowdsourcing platform of Amazon Mechanical Turk , provides descriptions of photos in the form of a small printout through the thermal printer Adafruit (inspired by Polaroid instant photos).


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The brain of the camera is a Texas Instruments BeagleBone microcomputer running Linux. USB camera, mrBBIO module for sending and receiving data from BeagleBone contacts, and several scripts for sending tasks to the Mechanical Turk service and receiving answers.

Presentation from the author:


So far this camera is a prototype of the device, therefore it communicates with the Internet via Ethernet and is powered by external 5v.

Results of work:


After clicking the button, the camera sends a photo to the MT service, and waits for the results of processing. With a processing cost of $ 1.25, results usually come in 3-6 minutes.

Text examples:


“A colorless photograph of a dilapidated building. It does not function and needs repair. ”


"An ugly cabinet with drawers and inscriptions on them, to which a desk lamp is attached."


“The corner of the room with a wooden floor, in which there is a tool box, is large, a stack of books, a box. An open door with a bag hanging from a handle, a pair of closed adjacent doors with cables hanging from their handles. ”

The author of this creation, Mat Richardson , talks about how hard it is to store and catalog a large number of photos, and how great it would be to have a description of it with keywords at once with each photo.

Of course, the current version of the camera is more like a technological installation from the Museum of Modern Art, but there are prospects for this idea. Probably.