GO-Finder: A Registration-free Wearable System for Assisting Users in Finding Lost Hand-held Objects

People spend an enormous amount of time and effort looking for lost objects. To help remind people of the location of lost objects, various computational systems that provide information on their locations have been developed. However, prior systems for assisting people in finding objects require users to register the target objects in advance. This requirement imposes a cumbersome burden on the users, and the system cannot help remind them of unexpectedly lost objects. We propose GO-Finder (“Generic Object Finder”), a registration-free wearable camera-based system for assisting people in finding an arbitrary number of objects based on two key features: automatic discovery of hand-held objects and image-based candidate selection. Given a video taken from a wearable camera, GO-Finder automatically detects and groups hand-held objects to form a visual timeline of the objects. Users can retrieve the last appearance of the object by browsing the timeline through a smartphone app. We conducted user studies to investigate how users benefit from using GO-Finder. In the first study, we asked participants to perform an object retrieval task and confirmed improved accuracy and reduced mental load in the object search task by providing clear visual cues on object locations. In the second study, the system’s usability on a longer and more realistic scenario was verified, accompanied by an additional feature of context-based candidate filtering. Participant feedback suggested the usefulness of GO-Finder also in realistic scenarios where more than one hundred objects appear.