[ExI] old video

[spike]

From: spike [mailto:spike at rainier66.com] 
Subject: old video

 

>.  It is too bad I have no known way of identifying any of the women in
those old videos, or any way to collect old beach video in some central
location to invite people who might have been strutting beaches in the early
60s to come in and try to find themselves and their friends.  That might be
a hoot.  spike

 

 

Oh my, I am getting that tingly feeling I often get when an idea comes along
and I know someone somewhere is going to make a toooonnnnnn of money if they
are the first one to work it out.  I got that feeling in 1993 when I heard
someone describe this new thing that was coming, the World Wide Web.  I had
it again when I heard of PayPal.  Here's what is giving me the tingly
feeling:

 

Imagine a website where anyone could submit photos of themselves from any
particular year, say 1964 and 1971 for instance.  The state of the art in
digital image recognition is either already there or will soon be to the
point where it could search digital video files looking for a particular
person from their still photograph.  Image recognition hipsters, do help me
here.  So if we had an old video archive where anyone could submit their
still photos and have the software dig around looking in the crowd scenes in
the archived video, we might be able to pick up some hits.  We could email
back a tantalizing description to the prole: "We found about 17 seconds of
video of you walking on the beach in a yellow polka dot bikini in 1963, and
oh my what a young beauty.  Three stills from that file enclosed.  We will
send you the entire digital file, 344 frames, only $3.99, such a deal.  PS
the staff loves your walk."

 

We could even collect old film video from devices often no longer
serviceable, in exchange for returning a complete digital file.  That's what
we have: the old film is in remarkably good shape, but the projector is worn
out, the nylon cogs are worn and irreplaceable, and it is hard to find the
old bulbs and so on.  The projector still works but not well.

 

So the challenge is to write software which can somehow take a still image
and find that person in a digitized old home movie scene.  Hipsters how
close are we to that?

 

Oh my, just thinking of the potential profit makes my butt hurt.

 

spike

    

 

 

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