How Google Cracked House Number Identification in Street View
January 7th, 2014Via: MIT Technology Review:
Google can identify and transcribe all the views it has of street numbers in France in less than an hour, thanks to a neural network that’s just as good as human operators.
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But the task of spotting and identifying these numbers is hugely time-consuming. Google’s street view cameras have recorded hundreds of millions of panoramic images that together containing tens of millions of house numbers. The task of searching these images manually to spot and identify the numbers is not one anybody could approach with relish.
So, naturally, Google has solved the problem by automating it. And today, Ian Goodfellow and pals at the company, reveal how they’ve done it. Their method turns out to rely on a neural network that contains 11 levels of neurons that they have trained to spot numbers in images.
