Show HN: Mobile Game – Car Hunters | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Mobile Game – Car Hunters

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53 pointskosche27 comments

Hi guys,

I want to share a project me and couple more guys were working on last year - Car Hunters. Essentially we built a mobile game using Computer Vision and AI.

Some problems we had to solve while working on Car Hunters:

- we collected a pretty solid dataset of car images (~3mil photos so far). For that we built own software, which helps us to support car models hierarchy, maintain links, retrain recognition models and deliver recognition model-binaries to the end-user devices;

- make/model recognition is done on the end-user device and both android/iOS platforms run neural network inference on GPU;

- we built-in pretty fast and reliable object-tracker which is independent of platform as well.

So what is Car Hunters? We've all heard about Pokemon Go, where you hunt for virtual creatures. We offer you instead to get points and unlock achievements by searching for cars in real world!

More details and description can be found in Google Play and Apple App Store. Car Hunters is available only in 10 countries for now. Let me know if you unable to download it but would like to.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/car-hunters-discover-cars/id14...

I would appreciate if you share Car Hunters with those, who might love cars as much as we do!

Thanks.

So are you just gamifying users collecting a large data set for you? I think that is genius.

What are you doing to encourage engagement? Why would one keep playing? Is there something other than just seeing their score go up?

Hi jermaustin1! Not exactly, we don't use users' data to extend dataset. Photos made by users are labeled (classified) by existing nn, and you don't want to use results produces by nn to retrain same nn.

Currently we have points, achievements for unique cars, some useful info, like prices of the cars. But we are constantly thinking what to add more.

Just downloaded the app for iOS. Really cool idea.

Thank you! :)

What an insanely clever idea. Great work! 3M photos is a huge dataset; I’m guessing each photo already had associated metadata and you did not hand-classify? Where did you grab such a large dataset?

There are two main sources: used car sites and youtube. Used car sites have ads classified across make/model hierarchy already - you just need to filter away unsuitable photos - this task can be automated. And youtube is good for new models. We do some hand-classification as well, but only for rare cars, where images are not easy to find.

Do you have a service like this in the US (or your country)?

You can enter a registration plate and get a huge amount of data, including historic MOT details:

https://www.gov.uk/get-vehicle-information-from-dvla

I’m not sure what an MOT is called in other countries, but it ensures a car is roadworthy.

This is a brilliant idea actually. This could be a brilliant addition for car resellers, given that most use their smartphones to take pictures of their car park: New listing > take photos > most of the data is pre-filled.

Yes, you a right. We think about this direction. Here is another video which shows how this can be used for 'quick cars search'

https://youtu.be/BFlaqSz0Cmo

Very impressive, keep up the good work :)

After reading the title and watching first 2 seconds I thought it will fire a rocket launcher and the car would go up in flames thanks to AR.

That is an interesting idea :)

And the car owner can deploy static defenses and traps...

That would be so cool. While you're walking away from your parking space, you get a satellite view or an AR view where you can drop defenses. I think the satellite view would be harder since you'd have to pick your parking spot so the UI can place your top down car picture and then place obstacles and defenses

What a coincidence I have also launched very similar app recently. However, mine doesn’t have the gamification concept (hunter) which I think is brilliant. Mine can be found here: https://about.mudcar.dev/

ha! Interesting. Did you train model yourself or find some ready available?

BTW we also have an API for car's make/model/years/color/angle recognition. We can share API key for that if you'd like: https://carnet.ai

We collected images, labeled the data and trained our model all on our own. We now have about 330k images (about 1800 models). We used resnet152 to train it.

I see. Sounds pretty similar to what we do.

We are just CS students and started this just for learning and experiencing with hands on computer vision and AI. So things are not very mature. Like we haven’t make the inferencing on the end user devices. The recognition runs on the server instead. And we don’t have many images as you do. We just crawled images on the web. Also, it doesn’t work very well with cars that can’t be found at where we lived, because we dont even know those models exist lol

We had/have this problem too. If nn "sees" unknown model it tries to classify it as one of known models. To avoid this, we added 'Other/Other' bucket and put ~3k images of different cars/buses/trucks in there. Now unknown models in most cases are classified as 'Other/Other' label.

Aww man, worst timing now that more and more are getting locked down :/

maybe repost in a month or two or three

Yes. I thought about that too. Totally agree, timing is not 'perfect' :(, but could not just wait.

Cool idea, a game using ML object recognition. Haven't tried it but it looks more reliable than Plantsnap [1].

1. https://www.plantsnap.com/

I didn't really get the game idea, but cool demo and maybe a fun challenge would be to find a car worth a certain amount of money...

Yes. We thought about using car's value for quests/achievements. Haven't find reliable source for pricing data yet.

Current concept idea is very similar to one you suggested. Every car is assigned with some amount of points based on car's rarity. Player is then tasked to find certain models and get points for that.

We are thinking about adding 'social' element at some point: function to share car photos comment/react on them

Love this idea! Perfect timing as well with other social activities curtailed makes walking the neighbourhood streets into a fun game!

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