Student's iDentifi app puts object recognition in the hands of the visually impaired

For someone who is blind or partially sighted, everyday tasks can be a pain -- choosing the right can from the pantry, for instance, or picking up the right book from the table. A smartphone could help them with this kind of problem, of course, if it knew how to identify objects and describe them to the user -- which is precisely what this app from a 12th-grade student from Toronto does. It isn't the only app out there that can tell what it's looking at, but it has the advantage of being aimed at visually impaired users and multiple languages from the start. Anmol Tukrel began working on it a year ago after learning about the possibilities of machine learning and computer vision. They also have been trained on a wide variety of objects and expressions, so it won't be stumped easily.