Real Time Object Detection for $59

There was a time when making a machine to identify objects in a camera was difficult, even without trying to do it in real time. But now, you can do it with a Jetson Nano board for under $60. How well does it work? Watch [Murtaza’s] video below and see what you think.

The first few minutes of the video piqued our interest, and good thing, too, because the 50 lines of code get a 50-plus minute video! It is worth watching, though, because there’s a lot of good information about how to apply this technique in your own projects.

Of course, there is a lot more than 50 lines of code doing the work. The Jetson code and OpenCV do a lot of heavy lifting. But it is a great thing to leverage powerful tools to make tough jobs easy.

We were impressed with the neural network’s ability to reason out images. There was an image of a person opening up a sofa into a bed and the system correctly identified it as both a sofa and a bed. Pretty impressive.

We’ve seen dedicated object recognition systems at this price point, but the Jetson has a lot of flexibility. We were excited to see the Jeston Nano and with 128 cores and a good bit of memory, we are waiting to see more really powerful projects built around it.