Ideas change everything

How computers learn to recognize objects instantly

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Joseph Redmon |

TED2017

• April 2017

Ten years ago, researchers thought that getting a computer to tell the difference between a cat and a dog would be almost impossible. Today, computer vision systems do it with greater than 99 percent accuracy. How? Joseph Redmon works on the YOLO (You Only Look Once) system, an open-source method of object detection that can identify objects in images and video -- from zebras to stop signs -- with lightning-quick speed. In a remarkable live demo, Redmon shows off this important step forward for applications like self-driving cars, robotics and even cancer detection.

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Ten years ago, researchers thought that getting a computer to tell the difference between a cat and a dog would be almost impossible. Today, computer vision systems do it with greater than 99 percent accuracy. How? Joseph Redmon works on the YOLO (You Only Look Once) system, an open-source method of object detection that can identify objects in images and video -- from zebras to stop signs -- with lightning-quick speed. In a remarkable live demo, Redmon shows off this important step forward for applications like self-driving cars, robotics and even cancer detection.

Want to use TED Talks in your organization?

This talk was presented at an official TED conference.

Read our curation guidelines.

Learn more about the YOLO system — a state-of-the-art, real-time object detection system.

About the speaker

Computer scientist

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Joseph Redmon works on the YOLO algorithm, which combines the simple face detection of your phone camera with a cloud-based AI -- in real time.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference.

Read our curation guidelines.

Learn more about the YOLO system — a state-of-the-art, real-time object detection system.