The Status Quo Of Computer Vision

prostoalex writes "The Industrial Physicist sums up the recent advances and developments in the world of computer vision. They mention an application for human-computer interfacing using a Webcam, Philips Research Lab Seeing with Sound product, which augments vision for visually impaired, as well as various frontal face detection applications."

Comments

Algorithmic Progresses

[Neuronerd]

While it is clearly true that only the recent advances in computer speed allowed the Computer Vision Systems we are seeing now there are also other important influences.

In particular there are really also better algorithms than a number of years ago. Many if not most successful computer vision systems use statistical Methods. In the case of faces for example they often build a probabilistic model of what a face is. Such models know that a face should usually has eyes but not always. That some people have beards etc. And these models train themselves up from a database of stimuli, for example real faces.

A number of recent advances makes such probabilistic models fast enough to work well on real world data. In a sense is the problem of computer vision very similar to the problem of understanding a voice or extracting the highest possible bitrate from a stream of data transmitted via a telephone line. And indeed the resulting algorithms are often surprisingly similar