Microsoft's computer vision technology may be in your next 'smart' refrigerator

Microsoft is collaborating with household appliance company Liebherr that will have Microsoft's Computer Vision API used inside future Liebherr refrigerators and freezers.

Liebherr

In a blog post, Microsoft says that the collaboration will create an image processing system that will be able to detect and identify food products inside Liebherr refrigerators:

Starting with a general purpose computer vision model learned from millions of generic images, the Microsoft system can learn to recognize new types of objects – milk cartons, ketchup bottles, pickle jars and much more – from example images. When a new image from inside a refrigerator is provided to the newly learned model, it can detect the presence of the objects it has seen before during training.

This technology will help people with future Liebherr refrigerators quickly identify what food and other items are inside from anywhere, via a smartphone app. That will allow them to create a shopping list from that app so they can better manage their grocery needs. There's no word on when Microsoft's Computer Vision API will be included in Liebherr's products.

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John Callaham