I have multiple issues with the so-called "saliency detector" in this pull request: https://github.com/hansonrobotics/HEAD/pull/117 that I'm thinking its better to discuss these in general, rather than simply in the context of one pull request.
So:... On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 10:06 AM, natnaelargaw <[email protected]> wrote: > the frequency of occurrence of a salient point with in a fixed turn around > time t. Further more, this method norm First off, the entire module seems to be mis-named -- it has nothing at all to do with "saliency" -- rather, the device seems to be a motion-tracker. Something can be highly salient, and completely still, but that is not what this does, based on the description in the README. Next, I'd like to see an API change. Put yourself in the place of opencog. Suppose you were blind-folded, and someone was whispering in your ear: "hey, there is something important happening in the upper left. Oh wait, now its less important. ... now its more important, again! Oh and also, there's something to your right, but its not very important." What can you possibly do with that data? WTF? How can I possibly build a smart robot, when its effectively blind-folded, and has the above as sensory input? Thus, I suggest completely eliminating the "degree of saliency" measure from the API, and replacing it by three things: the *size* of the moving area, *how fast* its moving, and its color. Now, blind-folded, you get the message: "its very small, its moving slowly, and its black", and you might guess that its a fly buzzing around. "its big and its green and its up high and its bouncing" and you might guess its a helium balloon. "its medium and its skin toned" and you might guess a waving hand or arm. Size speed and color should be easy to add, and would really be useful. For bonus points, I'd like a spinning/waving measure. So, for example, a ceiling fan is "moving" but it never changes position. Similarly, a TV set in the background is "moving", without changing its location. Likewise, anyone who is waving their hand -- the hand is moving but really stays in the same place. This is very different from things the move and also change position -- someone walking across the room is both moving and changing position. Another bonus measure: is it moving up, down, sideways? There's four more bits of data that would be useful, unrelated to motion: -- a general sense of how bright or dark the room is, -- a general sense of the contrast in the image (sharp black/what, or mostly washed-out grey) -- sudden changes in overall lighting -- average color for the entire visual field. Sunlit rooms tend to have high contrast; lots of blue suggests the sky is visible; a sudden change of lighting suggests that someone put their hand over the camera. Apparently, people cover the camera with their hands a lot during demos, and I would really really like to know when that happens. There's other stuff I'd like to see, that would allow the robot to actually *learn*, but that is for a some future email. The short version is that I would like to be able to send the detector some little tiny snippets of pseudo-code, and have it run that pseudo-code, and report when it triggers. The pseudo-code would consist of little algorithmic combinations of speed, color, movement, size, etc. and opencog would generate these and use them as feature detectors. I.e. rather than hard-coding (hand-coding) the feature detectors, they would be generated dynamically, on the fly, by opencog itself, rather than by human programmers. This is an idea for the future, though. Important, but not urgent. -- Linas -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "opencog" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/opencog. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/opencog/CAHrUA36VqAbpUC9stfFWgGge-P%2B7ojFYkHNxftJgN9knxQNpUg%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
