What is Computer Vision?
Computer vision is the field of study that involves the formation of techniques that helps the computers to see and understand thing like humans. It is abbreviated as a CV. It is actually the subject of artificial intelligence. As we see something like video or picture, we can easily tell all the aspects of the testing thing. The problem with the computer is that it is a human-made thing and not intelligent like a human. It cannot express each detail of the photograph merely by looking at it. But, we humans can do it and remember it for a long time. It has been in trend for a long time but we have seen remarkable progress recently in this field.
Computer vision is the field that actually helps computers to understand and interpret all the data and aspects of the visual world. The digital images and videos and all the seep learning models can be easily identified by the computers. Computers can react to the things they see and classify them.
History of computer Vision:
- It has been in consideration since the 1950s and even the early experiments were conducted in the 1950s. In the very first experiments, the neural networks were base. They use these networks to detect the edges of the object and then classify them in different categories like a sphere, circle, rectangular, triangle, and square, etc.
- In 1970, the next step was the recognition of the hand texts into the texts. The typed or handwritten characters were identified by using the optical character techniques. Then this was extremely used to intercept the texts for the blind.
- Well, the progress continued and in the 1990s there were a lot of images available for the analysis and then new things opened the eye in technology that was facial recognition. This facial recognition method made the computers enable us to identify the people by the photos or in videos.
- Now a day a lot of new and advanced options have added to the computer vision. There are computing powers that are very easy to access and very affordable for everyone. The mobiles have built-in cameras and help to deal with photos or videos from all over the world. The new algorithms have been added to the computer that gives better hardware and soft wares. All the advancement has made things more easily and the visual detection capability of the computers has increased from 50 percent to 99 percent. They have made computers enough intelligent to detect things as humans do.
How does computer vision work?
Computer vision works basically in three steps: –
Getting an image to test:
The images can be of larger set, real-time and photos of 3D technology.
Processing of the image:
The deep learning uses automatic techniques for the process but they prefer to label the images then identify it by comparing it with the already classified image.
Understanding the photo:
This is the last but the final step of the visual detection process. This step makes the computers to classify into the specific category. Now many other options have been added: –
- Image segmentation
- Objects detection
- Facial recognition
- Edge recognition
- Pattern detection
- Image classification
- Feature matching
Applications of Computer vision:
Media:
These are widely used in the media as the: –
- Visual effects in TV reconstructions
- Visual effects for films
- semantics-based auto edits (reconstruction, recognition)
- virtual sports replay (reconstruction)
Web use:
It is widely used in this field. I have tried to cover everything under this so let’s have look: –
- YouTube (content categorization)
- Facebook (image captioning)
- Google photos (object recognition, face recognition, scene recognition, geolocalization from vision)
- Image search
- Google maps aerial imaging (image stitching)
Smartphones:
Well, smartphones are the need for everyone and almost every person has it. Computer vision has made fantastic progress in this field too.
- computational photography (Android Lens Blur, iPhone Portrait Mode)
- panorama construction (Google Photo Spheres)
- Snapchat filters (face tracking)
- Google Lens
- QR codes
- face detection,
- expression detection (smile)
- Night Sight (Pixel)
Medical Imaging:
Computer vision has made remarkable progress in the medical field too. They have made an easy inspection of the diseases and better treatment. This advancement has made a medical diagnosis easier.
- Automatic pathology
- AI-guided surgery
- CAT/MRI reconstruction
- Assisted diagnosis
- Connectomics
Insurance:
- Damage analysis
- Property inspection
- Claims automation
VR/AR:
- Object Occlusion (dense depth estimation)
- Inside out tracking (simultaneous localization and mapping, HoloLens)
- Outside-in tracking (HTC VIVE)
Bottom Line:
Computer vision has been in consideration for a long time. As time passes the progress is made and we hope that it will prevail in the upcoming time. The computer vision will become totally 100 percent. It will become quite accurate to understand digital things just by looking at them. So, this is the best file for the students who are interested in artificial intelligence and deep learning.