Hi LInas, many of your suggestions are good ones and should be added to the list
However, the "visual saliency" term was not invented by us -- and the addition of this saliency detector was especially suggested by David H because in his prior work he has found similar code to be useful with his robots.... So I guess I will trust him that it's a useful indicator to have, even though I agree with you that lots of other stuff is also useful The reason for adding a "Degree" was that without it, the saliency detector gave way too many false positives.... Having a degree lets us tune a threshold denoting what is salient enough to bother doing anything about... ben On Mon, Aug 8, 2016 at 1:01 PM, Linas Vepstas <[email protected]> wrote: > Oops, hit "send" on the email too soon. > > Perhaps the #1 most important thing on the list is the "sudden change in > brightness" detector. During the demos people either cover her camera or > get up in her face, and say things like "can you see me now", and I would > really like to have the robot know when this is happening -- this is > probably the #1 most important demoable feature, more important than > saliency, movement, anything else. > > The #2 most important feature would be size-of-movement -- another thing > people do is to wave their hand directly in front of the camera: From the > camera point of view, it would look like everything is moving everywhere -- > the entire visual field is moving. It doesn't have a location, because its > everywhere. Again, this is a very important situation to recognize, and > relay to the robot. > > Both of the above should be easy to implement, and are more important, > demo-wise, than "saliency". > > --linas > > > > On Mon, Aug 8, 2016 at 2:49 PM, Linas Vepstas <[email protected]> > wrote: >> >> 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 >> >> >> > -- Ben Goertzel, PhD http://goertzel.org Super-benevolent super-intelligence is the thought the Global Brain is currently struggling to form... -- 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]. 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