SK Telecom won a runner-up prize at the “VizWiz Grand Challenge 2018” hosted by the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), showing off its AI technology to the world, the company said on Sept. 16.
The "VizWiz Grand Challenge 2018" refers to a competition that participants make an appropriate answer to a variety of questions about images taken by visually handicapped people by using data sets created by the University of Texas at Austin in the U.S.
The biggest feature of the contest is to answer to the questions and photos taken by more than 10,000 blind people on their smartphones, not the existing Visual Questioning (VQA) method that answers refined images and questions.
Images captured directly by people who are blind include a number of images that are not related to questions, faded or distorted owing to their physical limitations, requiring a higher level of cognitive ability than to recognize refined images.
Besides SK Telecom's T-Brain, a research team from Seoul National University led by Professor Chang Byung-tak participated in the contest jointly, and it submitted 8,000 images in advance from June 20 to August 17 to the organizer, using Bilinear Attention Networks(BAN) algorithm .
In particular, Dr. Kim Jin-hwa, who led the research team with Choi Yong-seok and Hong Sung-eun, said, "This competition is not a method of recognizing structured image data presented by the organizer. It is very meaningful that the perception rate of real data such as photos taken by people who are blind was raised. SK Telecom has taken a meaningful first step in developing an artificial intelligence program for the socially disadvantaged.”
The research paper on algorithms that won the VizWiz competition will be published at the International Association of Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) to be held in Montreal, Canada in December this year.