AI Camera Knows Its S**t

[Caleb] shares a problem with most dog owners. Dogs leave their… byproducts…all over your yard. Some people pick it up right away and some just leave it. But what if your dog has run of the yard? How do you know where these piles are hiding? A security 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 detect the dog’s posture while producing the target. This is probably 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 many other dogs, although we know of at least one dog 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).