News + Trends

Artificial intelligence finds your stolen bike

29/3/2022

Translation: machine translated

A program analyzes bicycle images offered on online marketplaces according to certain criteria. The goal: to make stolen bikes traceable.

It also happened to me half a year ago: My beloved gravel bike was stolen at the train station. Thanks to insurance, there was almost no financial damage. The emotional loss, on the other hand, weighed much heavier. In the weeks that followed, I searched online marketplaces like Ricardo and Ebay in the hope of finding my stolen bike. But at some point I gave up hope, or rather I had neither the time nor the energy to spend hours searching the web for my beloved bike.

A Reddit user has now taken care of the problem, as the IT industry portal heise.de writes. The user, who says he himself was affected by a bike theft, programmed the online tool Find My Bike, which uses artificial intelligence to search online ads for stolen bikes.

Even AI has its limits

But why not simply search for my bike specifically on online marketplaces using filter settings such as brand frame size or color? Quite simply because resourceful thieves are often wary of posting stolen bikes online with the correct details. "Find My Bike", on the other hand, analyzes the posted photos of the bikes according to predefined criteria such as type of bike, the shape of the frame and the color with an artificial intelligence (AI). The results of a search are then output in the form of a list.

Ist das nicht mein Velo, das mir kürzlich geklaut wurde!?

However, as Heise writes, the program does not yet function flawlessly. In some cases, bicycles with the wrong color or otherwise inappropriate criteria are displayed as search results. The developer is also aware of this, which is why he has added a "Report Error" button. This allows users to make a specific correction for an entry - for example, the correct color. The AI is then to be further trained with the corrected information on an entry in order to improve its recognition performance. The developer is also asking for help in improving the user interface. To this end, he has created a questionnaire that voluntary testers of the service can fill out.

The service is still of limited use to Swiss victims of theft, as their bicycles are rarely to be found on ebay.ch. Who knows, maybe soon a resourceful programmer will be found to develop something similar for tutti.ch or ricardo.ch. Until then, I will simply double lock my new bike.

53 people like this article