Originally, a Matroid is a mathematical structure in combinatorics. It is now also the name of a company that detects people and objects in video feeds, and allows users (and devs) to build their own custom detectors.

Founded by Stanford professor Reza Zadeh, Matroid allows you to create your own video information detector by training it, feeding it images and video clips. The idea is that you collect a large number of videos featuring a person or object that you would like to detect. This way, Matroid could analyze other videos and automatically tell you whether that person or object features in it.

Damn. They’re bound to find him now…

Interesting for police, obviously, but there’s also a commercial angle. A company might want to know where and how much their product features in videos and photos. They would unleash Matroid on various video sites and discover the information they need. Matroid even allows you to run their algorithms locally, so companies do not need make their videos available to Matroid. Police, again, will be happy.