Video Analysis and Responsive Mirror part II

Responsive Mirror part II

For those who are interested in what happened to the responsive mirror as discussed, here is a look at the second generation of the technology.

It is more integrated in terms of form factor and uses an enhanced video analysis core. As reported by Boing Boing: http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/06/30/how-parcs-responsive.html

Video Analysis

For the inner geeks in us, here is a high level description of the video analysis technology used for Responsive Mirror

1. Finding matches across images is performed by deriving a metric of similarity (i.e., a distance) between two images.
2. Then, an optimization is performed to find the best matches across two sets of images that minimize the aggregate distance between the two sets.

Some technical details

1. What is the similarity metric between two individual images?
Modified version of Euclidean distance by treating an image as a large vector of pixel values.
2. What is the “aggregate distance” between two sets of images (as opposed to two individual images)?
Contact me (email: "yfjuan (at) parc (dot) com") for more information on the answer
3. How is the optimization performed?
Greedy descent algorithm to minimize aggregate distance.