Making Things Talk

296 MAKING THINGS TALK

Physical Identification

The process of identifying physical objects is such a fundamental part of our experience

that we seldom think about how we do it. We use our senses, of course: we look at, feel,

pick up, shake and listen to, smell, and taste objects until we have a reference for them

— then we give them a label. The whole process relies on some pretty sophisticated

work by our brains and bodies, and anyone who’s ever dabbled in computer vision

or artificial intelligence in general can tell you that teaching a computer to recognize

physical objects is no small feat. Just as it’s easier to determine location by having a

human being narrow it down for you, it’s easier to distinguish objects computationally

if you can limit the field, and if you can label the important objects.

Just as we identify things using information from our

senses, so do computers. They can identify physical

objects only by using information from their sensors. Two

of the best-known digital identification techniques are

optical recognition and radio frequency identification, or

RFID. Optical recognition can take many forms, from video

color tracking and shape recognition to the ubiquitous bar

code. Once an object has been recognized by a computer,

the computer can give it an address on the network.

The network identity of a physical object can be centrally

assigned and universally ...