Shifting the machine vision paradigm?

It’s often said that knowledge is power, and I’m sure that’s true in the machine vision world. If the technology was easy to implement half of us would be out of a job!

So should we be worried by Pixy? This little Kickstarter project concerns what I’d have to call a color smart camera being jointly developed by Charmed Labs and Carnegie Mellon University. There’s an explanatory video on the Pixy Kickstarter page, along with a detailed description. The concept or goal seems to be to make machine vision simple.

 

If you want to contribute, the funding period closes September 14^th 2013.

The video seems to envisage the main application as being in robot guidance. What really caught my attention though was the idea of the color-coded signals. Watch the video for a full explanation, but in essence the idea is that the camera can be directed by using combinations of colored labels. Thus a red over a green could tell the camera to take one action, and red over blue a different action.

Not entirely sure what the industrial applications might be, but I shall be looking for some!