[Caleb] shares a problem with a lot of canine owners. Dogs leave their… byproducts…all over your yard. Some people pick it up best away and some just leave it. but what if your canine has run of the yard? how do you know where these piles are hiding? A safety and security video camera and AI image detection is the answer, but probably not the way that you think.
You might think as we did that you could train the system to recognize the–um–piles. but instead, [Caleb] elected to have the AI do animal pose estimation to discover the dog’s posture while producing the target. This is probably much easier than recognizing a nondescript pile and then it doesn’t matter if it is, say, covered with snow.
The dog’s posture indicates both that the event has occurred and suggests where it happened. A map gets a red circle updated on a web page so you can correctly identify the location of the land mines. We were expecting a robot to pick it up, but maybe that’s a project for later in the year.
Although the system is tuned for Twinkie, it probably would work for numerous other dogs, although we know of at least one canine who has a signature posture but moves through the whole process, so we bet you’d have to retrain for that behavior.
It seems the system would be worth its weight in gold indoors and connected to your robot vacuum. We’ve actually seen something similar to this before (the video is still there, but the link is dead).