[Gaessaki]

I think what the CountThings app is doing is great. There are too many industries where tasks are being performed inefficiently due to a lack of applying readily available technology. They had the foresight to develop a product for a very common problem and make a business out of it.

I’m a bit surprised that this is making the rounds of HN though. OpenCV and other computer vision libraries have trivialized such counting applications for decades now. ML isn’t really necessary.

The watershed algorithm for example, comes built-in and allows segmentation which can then be followed up with blob counting: http://www.cmm.mines-paristech.fr/~beucher/wtshed.html

I don’t want to diminish OP’s work since the product seems to be well-developed and respond to a real need. I guess the challenge must have been making the app robust enough to support different workloads, lighting conditions, etc. I suppose the novelty factor is seeing to what extent the technology that we as developers and engineers work on every day is often disconnected from practical application.

[pokoleo]

This article is perfectly within HN's audience!

• Clever way to distribute "the future" to a niche/under-served audience

• MVP (likely) buildable in a week/weekend

• Marketing material demonstrating success

• "This could be my passive income side project" appeal to bored tech company engineers

It underlines the thesis in some patio11's content:

> The future is here, it's just not widely distributed yet.

[varjag]

The thesis is originally from William Gibson.

[wavefunction]

Just for reference for those unfamiliar, William Gibson said "The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed"

[bobthepanda]

For a non-tech company, implementing it may be easy but the hard part is getting someone around when it stops working. This saves 3 months for the pearl company, they're not paying someone full time for an implementation of computer vision counting.

SaaS allows this cost to be distributed across many clients, making it accessible for businesses that can't afford to keep around a full infrastructure and the engineers required to keep it running.

[varjag]

LOL you're not getting this done trivially with OpenCV.

https://countthings.com/en/counting-templates

[cogman10]

Count things isn't trivial, but this specific use case (counting circles) is trivial with opencv. I've done it myself making a robot follow a ball :)

[jjk166]

I still wouldn't consider this trivial. It takes a good bit of playing around with parameters like radius range and filters to consistently get all and only real circles. Even under ideal conditions, it's probably more than an hour of trial and error, and it's very easy for a layman to not fully understand why they're not getting the result they wanted. I'm no expert on jewelry but I imagine even a 0.1% error rate would be quite expensive, and that level of performance would be a real challenge for even someone very experienced with opencv.

[chrischen]

Agree. Especially if you can control the image quality, background, etc, this can be done with less fancy methods. Heck, they probably don’t even need an image based solution. They could have also used mostly mechanical machines like how coin counters/sorters work, or used a bigger version of their old counting plate method but with detectors in each slot.

[cogman10]

Background helps a lot, but if your things are relatively the same color, it's pretty easy to just filter out anything not within that color range and look for circles, even with an inconsistent background (though, admittedly it's harder).

That's effectively what I did with the ball tracking. I had a red ball and filtered out everything that wasn't roughly that shade. Certainly someone could have messed with me by wandering into frame with a red shirt :D

[varjag]

They could even make people count them by hand!

[chrischen]

Well no that wouldn't be fully automatic. A counting machine that just funnels the pearls through a switch is simple, automatic, non-patent encumbered, and cheap.

[serf]

amassing a library of scripts for various shapes is time-consuming, true.

however few of those templates do anything that openCV can't be massaged to do well, too.

Given that people are likely going to use only a few of the templates that they find useful for their own work, I find it hard to be able to find the value in paying 100/mo for a massive library filled with techniques that aren't useful for my particular work plus a UI with some polish.

Not only that , but counting stuff in the work place is often done as part of a process; it's dead easy to pipe openCV output into any system that might need to be aware of the count; it's not quite as easy with 'Counting Things' without a human in the loop.

[varjag]

No, with many of the templates you quickly go well beyond "massaging". Not saying it can't be done, but you vastly oversell the triviality of it.

[suifbwish]

Yet we still have humans counting pills in pharmacies

[Scoundreller]

Maybe in USA/Canada. In a lot of Europe, you’re getting sealed boxes. Often without any stickers applied.

7 day course? Here’s two boxes of 5. Do what you do with the last 3. A lot of homes are basically supermarkets of unused meds.

Though there are plenty of counting machines nowadays.

Here’s a primitive version from the UK:

https://youtu.be/foLAXcrYxF0