Cat Recognition Algorithms?

skunkeh writes "So your cat keeps bringing dead (or half dead) animals in to your house. What do you do? Obviously, you set up a digital camera to monitor the cat door and lock her out if she has something in her mouth..."

Re:What about other cats?

[jheinen]

If you look through the whole site you'll see tht the system can apparently recognize individual cats. There are two other cats that are allowed in (Ellipse & Squirrel). There's a log page that logs each day's events and identifies each cat by name and whether they were allowed in.

Re:This may also train the cat to...

[LiENUS]

the reason cats dont train too well is they really are very intelligent so they have a tendincy to ignore you if they dont want to do something. cats can even be toilet trained, you need to give them more credit.

I like the daily log of cat activity

[hattig]

It does show some false negatives though: 4th March [quantumpicture.com]

But pretty neat. And the site has withstood Slashdot somehow - something that bigger sites fail on regularly.

feature recognition and images

[phr2]

The "theory" section of the website begins

We consider any image to be a collection of a finite number of discrete features. This is a novel approach to images - until now they were always thought of as continuous.

The cat door hack is cool and all, but the methods used for recognizing it are basically the same ones that most OCR programs use to recognize printed letters. In fact you might even be able to train Omnifont Pro (or whatever it's called) to recognize that silhouette of your cat without a mouse. I've never heard of these methods being applied to cat doors before, but the idea that feature recognition is a novel technique is wishful thinking. I smell bogus patents coming out of this. Sigh.