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A Brief Introduction To Computer Vision

Computer vision is the field of giving computers the ability to understand what is in digital images and videos. It aims to extract high-level understanding from visual data in the way that humans are able to understand images. Computer vision works by using machine learning algorithms to analyze image data and detect patterns that allow computers to identify objects, scenes, and other meaningful information. While related, computer vision differs from image processing in that its goal is to understand the semantic content of images rather than just manipulate or enhance pixel values. Computer vision is an important and growing field that will be crucial for developing intelligent robots and autonomous systems, and careers in computer vision are expected to be in high demand.

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Arushi Khokhar
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320 views

A Brief Introduction To Computer Vision

Computer vision is the field of giving computers the ability to understand what is in digital images and videos. It aims to extract high-level understanding from visual data in the way that humans are able to understand images. Computer vision works by using machine learning algorithms to analyze image data and detect patterns that allow computers to identify objects, scenes, and other meaningful information. While related, computer vision differs from image processing in that its goal is to understand the semantic content of images rather than just manipulate or enhance pixel values. Computer vision is an important and growing field that will be crucial for developing intelligent robots and autonomous systems, and careers in computer vision are expected to be in high demand.

Uploaded by

Arushi Khokhar
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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A brief introduction to Computer Vision

In the past few decades we’ve made numerous strides to extend visual ability to
machines. We’ve been successful in imitating how the human eye captures light and
colour. For example, cameras. But, capturing images is easy. Understanding what’s
there in the image is a tedious job.

“Just like to hear is not the same as to listen. To take pictures,


is not the same as to see.”
- Fei Fei Li , a computer vision professor

Why exactly do we want computers to “see”?


Vision is one of the most crucial requirements to carry out almost any operation. Most
people rely on it to drive, walk around obstacles, read blog posts like these and what
not. Vision is the highest bandwidth sense and it provides a major part of information
about the state of the world and how to act on it. For this reason, computer scientists
have been trying to give computers vision for the past 5-6 decades, thus giving us a new
sub-field, the Computer Vision. Its goal is to extract high-level understanding from digital
images and videos so that it makes some sense for the computer.

How Computer Vision works?

Consider the following image:

Our brain can look at it and immediately know what it is (it’s the ACM logo). Our brains
are cheating since we’ve got a lot of evolutionary context to help us immediately
understand what this is. But a computer cannot do that. An algorithm sees the above
image like this:
Just a huge set of numbers which represent intensities of colours. There’s no context
here, just a huge pile of data. The context is the crux of getting algorithms to understand
image content in the same way as the human brain does.
To achieve the same, we use an algorithm which works very similar to how the human
brain functions using “Machine Learning”. Machine learning allows us to train the context
for a data set so that an algorithm can understand what all those integer values in that
specific organisation actually represent. This is just an outline of how computer vision
works. The actual algorithm is way more complex.

Computer vision and image processing: Are they same?


Not really. In image processing the input and the output are both images. An image
processing algorithm transforms images in many ways which includes blurring,
softening, changing brightness and contrast, etc.
Computer vision, on the other hand, focuses on making sense of what the machine
sees. A computer vision system inputs an image and outputs a specific information like
coordinates.
Computer vision and image processing work together at a number of times. Many
computer vision systems depend on on image processing algorithms. Computer vision
systems rarely use raw imaging data coming straight-away from a sensor. Instead they
use images that are processed by an image signalling processor.
The opposite is also possible. Many image processing methods have started to use
computer vision to improve the quality of images. For example, face beautification filters
use computer vision to detect faces and then apply various filters, remove blemishes,
etc.
Thus, these two terms cannot and should not be used interchangeably. However, there
are certain cases when the line between image processing and computer vision gets
blurry. For example, using pixel to pixel transformations, convolutional neural networks
(CNNs).

A career in computer vision?


It’s a common joke these days that AI is going to replace human employees with robots.
But for that to actually happen these robots have to be trained first and even afterwards.
Robots might fight our cases in the court. Robots may even replace doctors, but not
before computer vision and other AI professions make them smart and intelligent
enough for it. Even then, they’ll need monitoring and supervision. Our jobs aren’t going
away but they’ll definitely be changed dramatically. This makes computer vision one of
the most sought-after career fields.

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