An image recognition specialist stands up for the contest, 'If you guess the number of Mountain Dew hidden in the video, you'll win $ 1 million.'

On February 7, 2021, PepsiCo, which sells the soft drink ' Mountain Dew, ' created a commercial that said, 'A million dollars (about $ 1 million) was given to the first person to accurately guess the number of Mountain Dew shown in this commercial. We held a contest to give a prize of 105 million yen), and two days later, a computer vision expert released a method for analyzing images using AI.

Using Computer Vision to Help Win $ 1 Million in Mountain Dew's Big Game Contest
https://blog.roboflow.com/mountain-dew-contest-computer-vision/

The Mountain Dew commercial aired during the 55th Super Bowl on February 7, 2021. The content of the CM is a short movie of about 30 seconds in which fighter John Cena drives in a theme park where pink Mountain Dew PET bottles are scattered around. Below is the movie.

WIN $ 1MILLION! | 2021 “MTN DEW MAJOR MELON Bottle Count” w / John Cena --YouTube


Joseph Nelson, co-founder of Roboflow, a company that develops computer vision software, noticed this contest and thought that the object detection model he was developing would be useful, and accurately detected Mountain Dew. I started developing software.

Nelson first split the footage into three frames per second to create 92 images, and then manually annotated the Mountain Dew in all the images to create the dataset. Nelson said of this task, 'It's like counting all Mountain Dew while folding your fingers, but keep in mind that finding every bottle with your own eyes can be a daunting task. Hopefully You might be able to let computer vision learn Mountain Dew and find the bottle you overlooked. '

This work completed a dataset consisting of 91 images and a total of 869 annotations, excluding one frame that was blank. It should be noted that this data set is an open source public has been.

The resulting movie is below. You can see how the AI that has finished learning recognizes only Mountain Dew from the original video from the time of 12 minutes 53 seconds in the following movie.

Winning $ 1 Million with Computer Vision (Mountain Dew Super Bowl Contest)-YouTube


You can participate in the contest by replying to the corresponding tweet on the official Mountain Dew Twitter account. However, it is necessary to live in the United States and be legally an adult as a qualification for participation. It's unclear if Nelson himself entered the contest, but Nelson tweeted, 'I wish you good luck to win a million dollars.' In response to the comment 'So how many?' Sent to the YouTube movie, Nelson replied, 'That's homework for the viewers.'

By the way, the dataset (with annotations) is open sourced here: https://t.co/yNx7Xam6ya

And a fuller write up on how this worked is here: https://t.co/DxkBMfGIA5

Best of lucking winning the $ 1 million!

— Joseph Nelson (@josephofiowa) February 8, 2021