Aipoly is a free iPhone application developed by three young researchers from the University of the Singularity – an academic institution in Silicon Valley dedicated to the development of new technologies – with the purpose of recognizing the environment and, aloud, describing what they see at visually impaired people.
Marita Cheng, Alberto Rizzoli and Simon Edwardsson have created this app that recognizes objects in real time by simply focusing with the smartphone camera on the element we want to identify. No need to take photos: Aipoly constantly sees and thinks.
This intelligent assistant, which allows people with vision problems to explore and understand the environment around them through mobile, is based on deep learning , linked to machine learning.
In fact, the app is capable of recognizing about a thousand objects so far , but they continue working to increase that number. Likewise, Aipoly can be trained and learned, because it allows users to introduce their own corrections to the system saying what would be the most correct description to identify a specific element.
In the near future, it is intended that Aipoly can also understand complex scenes , as well as the position of objects in those scenes, so that it will be able to describe the relationships between the elements it detects. For example, you can make descriptions such as: "A dog next to a lamppost", they explain on the app's website.
