This smart home camera automatically shoots and edits the best moments in life
If a parent records her/his kid’s play time or activities, Kiba will automatically pick up the most interesting 5-20 second clips from the recording
My elder son, aged two-and-half years, was dancing with other kids in the courtyard of my parents’ home in Kerala (India) during a heavy downpour. I wanted to capture this precious moment. So I asked my wife to rush to my smartphone to click some snaps and film the scene.
But it was too late. By the time she pulled out the phone from the cupboard, the rains had abruptly stopped and the dance had come to a halt. I sat there disappointed for losing an opportunity to capture one of the cutest moments in my son’s life, which I could have preserved to relive and show to him when he grows up.
Life is so unpredictable — we cannot foresee certain things and some incidents occur when we least expect them to happen. And by the time we think of capturing such moments using a camera, it would be too late.
Delhi-based entrepreneur Pranav Mishra too has gone through similar experiences in life.
“It is my two children, aged two and nine, who keep our house buzzing with activity. It is their laughter and cry that keep me engaged and each day of their lives is peppered with so many delightful twists and turns,” Mishra tells e27.
“I always wanted to capture the best moments in their lives, but by the time I pulled out my phone or camera to click some snaps/shoot a video of their activities, it was too late. Many of the cute, sweet and zany things they did as little fellows just passed by without any opportunity to record them,” rues Mishra.
Mishra, an IIT Bombay graduate, decided to use his expertise in the computer vision and machine learning space to develop a camera that can choose its own shots, intelligently and automatically. So he shared his dream with Rajeswari Kannan, his former colleague at Nokia Research Centre, and she was excited too.
Kiba camera
And that’s when Kiba was born. Kiba, a product of Delhi-based LensBrick Technology, is a smart home movie camera that knows when and what to record using audio and visual sensors.
“This is a smart camera that allows users to capture authentic, spontaneous moments that often make our fondest memories. It can intelligently edit and distills videos. The camera has a joy-making technology that sends you five important 20-second clips each day,” says Mishra.
Watch the video.
If a parent records her/his kid’s play time or activities, the camera will automatically pick up the most interesting 5-20 second clips from the recording. The user can save these recordings by liking them. All liked clips are ranked and preserved for the user to share or relive,” Mishra says.
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Kiba cuts about 90 per cent of unwanted footage automatically, so you can stay present in the moment and in front of the camera with your loved ones.
One can also manually schedule Kiba to record and control it from across the room using voice commands.
The company’s target audience is parents with young kids. But in general, it wants to focus on the video search problem and movie is one of the potential industries. “Suppose if you want to pick some scene like a child’s cry or laughter, or spot a particular dialogue rendered by the lead actor, this camera comes in handy,” says Mishra.
“On the video side, Kiba has a feature to compress all the required information into 10MB of data for one hour of video. By crunching these features, we can figure out information like interactions, a single person walking in front of the camera or a kid jumping around, etcetera,” he elaborates.
“On the audio front,” he continues, “we can figure out stuff like whether a child or adult is speaking or if there is laughter in the background etcetera. All of this is combined together to find out the most interesting clips during the recording. So, for a typical one-hour of recording, it will give out the best five clips.”
The camera is priced at US$199.
Before founding Lensbricks, Mishra was part of Nokia Research Center in Bangalore. A visiting researcher at MIT Media Labs, he is also an expert in computational cameras.
In the past, he has developed a monoline camera that can capture a single line in a scene at 25,600 frames per second by exploiting rolling shutter of the sensor. He has also developed a face recognition system which was used in Nokia’s Meego brand of phones.
LensBricks is part of Qualcomm’s QDIC programme. The chip maker is helping the startup to develop hardware for the camera.
“Our team is made up of machine learning folks focused on technology. And it has been an ideal partnership for us to explore how we can bring hardware to the market, ” says Mishra.
“Labs at Qualcomm are just wonderful and such facilities are not available easily to startups in Bangalore. People working in the lab are very experienced in hardware and are able to help us out in a number of aspects,” he adds.
In March last year, the startup raised US$2 million led by Exfinity Ventures. It is now looking for additional funding to improve its technology.
The post This smart home camera automatically shoots and edits the best moments in life appeared first on e27.
