If you’re an exhibitor at Sacred Craft, you can come see my presentation of this new technology at 9:30am Saturday, August 14. (before the doors open at 10am).
Firewire is the first company to buy it and they are letting me give a demonstration at their booth in Sacred Craft at 9:30. Here you can see it on their site:
This is an embedded feature (just like a youtube video) that anyone can put on their website in 1 min. It is available to everyone worldwide for a small fee proportional to your inventory size.
Some cool points that are under the hood:
Board builders only need to supply i) an image of the model ii) length of each board for the model and iii) width of each board for the model.
Multiple image processing algorithms (that I wrote) will calculate all the specs based off the image that you provide.
The algorithms also rip the outline of the board from the image, then scale the outline appropriately for each size of the model.
Uploading boards to your account is as easy as uploading pictures to a Facebook account
We will track all the filters and comparisons that your customers conduct and give you real time stats so that you know what surfboard trends are in real time in YOUR area.
This application is turnkey. I can have this on your site within hours of signing up.
Health,
Benjamin Thompson
*in a couple of weeks, rocker comparisons will also be available
*image outlines are also in the process of being improved…cleaner lines
How does or can the software accurately compensate for the perspective & lens distortion of the camera shooting the image, and the view angle of the surfboard being photographed?
I won’t tell you how it does it, but it does take into account most distortions and corrects them : ) Sorry, that’s why this is in the industry forum, not general discussion. The algorithms are not for public disclosure.
Of course, if somebody wants to upload an image that is horrendously distorted and/or off axis, the algorithms would choke. But why would a board builder upload a terrible image?
How accurate are they? Well…our calcs often have about 1% discrepancy with what board builders publish. Rarely…up to 3%. It was pretty disconcerting at first, and then I actually started physically measuring boards. I discovered that their error was often as bad as mine. There’s error in everything built in this world, but that doesn’t mean that the error is at a level of significance. I would say that the error in my software is very very rarely at a level of significance and it is only getting better. We are tracking the errors, and calcs are constantly improving.
The reason I asked was that I’ve noticed that when photographing a surfboard where both the surfboard and the camera are in fixed positions. When the surfboard which is in frontal template view is rotated 180° on a fixed axis, the deck outline significantly differs from the bottom because of rocker of the board and the focal length of the lens. I’ve found that using a 105mm lens seem to fix this problem. If your shooting with a point and shoot camera or, an SLR with a stock lens, the distortion is quite apparent in the images.