The Computer Vision nominees for the Transform AI Innovation Awards | VentureBeat
To cap off our AI-focused Transform 2019 event, taking place July 10-11 in San Francisco, VentureBeat will recognize and award emergent, compelling, and influential work in AI through the inaugural AI Innovation Awards. We take pride in shining a light on innovation through that coverage, but these awards, presented by Ople, give us a chance to do so in a new way. This is the first of a series of articles highlighting the nominees is each of our five award categories: NLP/NLU, Business Application, Computer Vision, AI for Good, and Startup Spotlight.
Computer vision is an exciting subfield of AI that’s at the core of applications like facial recognition, object recognition, event detection, image restoration, and scene reconstruction — and that’s fast becoming an inescapable part of our everyday lives.
Unique, perhaps, among many AI companies, Affectiva has a track record dating back to 2009. Affectiva measures emotion on people’s faces and applies that to practical solutions in the automotive field, biometrics, and more. It’s analyzed more than 8 million faces for its data repository, and it uses a combination of computer vision, speech analytics, deep learning to create solutions and APIs that keep drivers and their passengers safe, help organizations conduct market research, and help researchers better understand human emotions.
Vue.ai
The irony of the depth and width of online retail is that the personal part of shopping is often lost. Vue.ai is bringing it back in a completely new way. Instead of a shopkeeper helping you pick out and try on clothes at a boutique, and anticipating and suggesting other garments you might like, and you spending hours twirling in front of mirrors, Vue.ai uses image recognition and data to do it all with AI. The company provides a whole stack of AI tools that organizations need at a time when many retailers and consultants can see that they need AI for their businesses but lack specific solutions. Vue.ai offers a starting point to bring AI into different fields in retail and lowers company’s barrier to entry.
What Hoobox does is use facial recognition to let people move their motorized wheelchair without having to use any other limbs or digits. How Hoobox accomplishes this feat is with a deep integration with Intel’s RealSense 3D camera, the OpenVINO computer vision toolkit, and a processor to power its Wheelie kit for wheelchairs. Hoobox partnered with Intel’s AI for Social Good initiative to bring Wheelie to life. Puckered lips, a smile, a stuck-out tongue, or other expressions can give someone a great deal of newfound freedom and control thanks to Hoobox’s AI..
Density.io
Density.io figured out how to use computer vision to count people in a way that helps organizations become more efficient, without jeopardizing the privacy of individuals. The company’s solution involves a small physical box — a complex sensor — that can be placed in any location and uses two IR beams to note and count people passing by, without using a camera that can record faces or other identifying information. The applications for Density’s tech range from detecting when a room is at capacity to spotting inefficiencies in building and office use to determining how many uses a facility gets before needing a cleaning.
The Transform AI Innovation award ceremony will be held on the evening of July 11 to cap off Transform 2019.