While my review of the Huawei Mate20 Pro is already up, one of the features I’m really enjoying is the camera’s ability to detect objects in the real world using AI.
The Computer Vision system works by firing up the camera app, selecting the standard Photo mode and tapping the eyeball-like icon in the top-left. When you tap that icon, the phone goes into ‘Identify’ mode, analysing the objects seen through is 3x lenses. This is one example where the phone leverages its dedicated AI processor, along with some very smart software, to deliver results within seconds. Once the objects are identified an AR tag is placed on top of it, which sticks to the object as you move your device around it.
These smart tags link you to multiple sources (Google images, Pinterest, etc) for more information on the object or object category, often showing you similar photos. There’s another option which is ‘Shopping’ mode and as you’d expect it provides options to purchase the item(s) identified.
The accuracy of this identification is pretty good, with most objects I tested with returning accurate results to the category. For example, a bottle of water returned a result of ‘bottled water’, not the specific brand or product. This means the analysis is largely looking for similar object shapes, rather than attempting to read labels etc.
It actually became quite a fun game to point at it the real world and see if the phone could detect it. One of the best successes was pointing it at a tree that I was unfamiliar with and it was able to identify from the shape and leaves that the plant.
Here’s some additional examples including shoes, wine, keyboard and a Roomba.. which may also be a turntable..
Anyone who’s watched the show Silicon Valley will remember the mobile app developed by Jin Yang, thankfully the Huawei Mate20 Pro and it’s HiVision (Huawei’s branding) does a much better job than his NotHotdog app.
