CEO & Founder Kepler Vision Technologies
Speaking at: Digital Transformation in Health Services from Screening and Diagnosis to Personalized Care
December 3, 2024 | 16:30 – 18:00
I have worked in computer vision for 30 years. I started as an intern at Philips, writing code to analyze medical CT scans. My PhD research focused on camera-based color measurement.
During this time, my colleagues at the University’s computer vision research group participated in an international video search competition called NIST Trecvid. The goal was to find video fragments within a 300-hour video collection. There were no text labels, only pixel values. The competition included participants like IBM, Microsoft, and Carnegie Mellon University, but my colleagues won five years in a row.
I then asked the University for a license to use their software. I believed its potential extended beyond academia and could be commercialized. That’s how Euvision Technologies began.
Our software could automatically identify content in pictures and videos, such as cats, dogs, or sunsets, years before Google introduced Image Search. However, we struggled to find paying customers. The software, based on machine learning, was adaptable. We trained it to recognize unwanted content.
Our largest client was an online dating platform, receiving 7,000 images per minute on weekends. We helped them block inappropriate content. Another client was the Dutch police, for whom we automated the detection of child abuse.
Despite these applications, it was challenging to attract more customers. We developed an iPhone app that sorted images into directories, like cats or sunsets, to demonstrate our software. The app gained attention from the Silicon Valley tech blog Techcrunch.
Qualcomm, the American chip manufacturer, noticed the app and acquired our company to enhance the Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine. I worked at Qualcomm for three years, where I observed computer vision advancing to recognize human poses and activities. This led me to start Kepler Vision.
At Kepler, we focus on the care sector to make a meaningful impact on society.
