Cat Recognition Algorithms? 430
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:This is quite spiffy. (Score:3, Interesting)
The whole point is to *not* let the cat in if the cat's brought home a little
will this work on my mother? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This may also train the cat to... (Score:4, Interesting)
:^)
Ryan Fenton
He knows more about technology than cats. (Score:5, Interesting)
Mother cats teach their young to hunt, first by bringing dead animals to the nest, then not-quite-dead animals, and finally injured but fairly lively prey. When the youngters can dispatch a wiggling dinner, they are ready to go on a hunt. What cats are doing when they bring dead or nearly-dead animals to the house is they are trying to teach the slow-witted and lazy humans that they live with to hunt!! We just don't get it.
Never has a cat had a student more resistant to instruction.
Essence of Conditioning (Score:3, Interesting)
You are conditioning the cat to either (1) drop the dead animal if it wishes to come inside or (2) remain outdoors.
As a animal lover, it bothers me should this actually be put to use as a consistant system. Whether humans understand or not, animals are far more intelligent than we think. The behavior of animals is quite instinctual and what would be the circumstances if we were to change their modes of thinking. Would it be possible by to ascertain that one of the following things might happen from this experiment:
(1) Cat runs away as it instinctually cannot assert its confidence. Much comparison has been made between dogs and cats. Cats seem predestined to take a singluar, individualistic, confident role in the food chain compared to dogs that rely on a class of relationship or borg mentality. Well dogs aren't completely borg but they seek out affection more out of insecurity and reassurance than cats.
(2) cat becomes feral or wild due to lack of fealty and companionship toward owner.
Cats aren't complete loners, ya' know.
Just some thoughts to cast out for conversation.
Ciao!
Re:What about other cats? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Fuck Safe Sex (Score:1, Interesting)
I found your post informative; eespecially your distinction of sperm entering the Fallopian tubes but I felt that you should be corrected for the sake of the "lesser-experienced" among the Slashdot crowd. Sperm does not shot "up into" the Fallopian tube but, rather, the "wad of jizz" is deposited into the vagina where it travels through the cervix.
For more information regarding contraception I suggest you visit this excellent page [ucsfivf.org] which details the whole process quite nicely.
Best Regards,
Anonymous Coward
image approach not novel! (Score:3, Interesting)
"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."
That's bullshit. Breaking down images into features is what nearly everybody in image analysis and recognition does. Look at the Matrox Genesis boards, current papers, books, and so on.
further on:
"If we can fully describe an image as a discrete collection of features, we can easily solve the image recognition problem"
Err, maybe their approach works under some conditions for one instance of image -analysis- (a different problem than recognition!). It looks like they can differentiate between two cats, so they have an approach for a relatively simple recognition problem too.
If they solved either "The Image Analysis Problem" or "The Image Recognition Problem" they'd be quickly famous and wealthy. These problems are notoriously difficult to solve even under extremely well controlled conditions. Their comments about image based content retrieval requiring so many operations is likewise untrue - making it ever more efficient and accurate is a popular research area.
Maybe I'm being anal, but I know enough about the subject to know what a load of hooey the "theory" page is.
-Kevin
My friend invented a cat pee detection algorithm.. (Score:4, Interesting)
He noticed a difference within a day, but it took about 2 weeks for the message to get across.
The fence charger is gone now, but his door is bone dry heh. (Well not really, he's in Portland, rains alot here...)
I have a feeling that if cats couldn't get through the door carrying rodents, they'd learn they can't go inside with them. I've personally witnessed cat behaviour modification hehe. My stepmom had a cat that wasn't allowed in the bedroom. So the cat wouldn't go in the bedroom, she'd avoid it. We're pretty sure, though, that she only followed that rule when everybody was home, though heh.
Re:Sorry Cats are too intelligent (Score:3, Interesting)
She has since learned to wedge a diningroom chair so as to keep the door from being opened. She still has to do this, many years after Sluggo passed on, because he taught the other cats how.
Cats are much smarter than people think. Sluggo would have laughed at this feeble attempt to constrain him
This *really* needs to be turned into a product. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:He knows more about technology than cats. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sorry Cats are too intelligent (Score:3, Interesting)
My cat used to do the same thing, to get outside, only stitting on the large deep freeze next to the back door. It would sit on the deepfreeze with it's paw on the knob, and pat at it when someone would walk by.
The good part was getting back in. It used to sit on the wood pile next to the steps at the back. Naturally, sitting there it would see friends come over and ring the door bell, and we would let them in. It didn't take very long before it learned to ring the door bell to get into the house too!
Re:This may also train the cat to... (Score:3, Interesting)
Moral of the story: Give a cat a challenge, and s/he'll regard it as a challenge to solve.