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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."
That's not doing much for computer vision. Most of the action in computer vision right now involves "homeland security" applications, real or imagined. The killer app for computer vision seems to be Big Brother.
Maybe it's some sort of technophilia but some of the posts on here are just pure vapor. Sure, there have been some great advances in computer vision and pattern recognition... but have some of these posters on here ever done any research in the area? Hell, most face recognition goes back to Fischer's 1936 iris data set and primary component analysis... not quite Wintermute stuff.
Too often vision projects find speedups by sacrificing one or another components. For instance, you can get some great face recognition with PCA... as long as the person's face is immobile. Tilt your head slightly or rotate too much and the system has no clue.
I'll admit, there is some killer work out there. But not of the full-blown "20 years and we will all have robotic man servants" thing. Keep the hype to a minimum.
What is music when you despise all sound?
I was stunned by how OCR went from "impossible" to "Trvial" and all that changed was moores law making high res scans available in memory in a typical PC. Expect many vision problems to fall by the wayside with new 240 Frames per second 3 megapixel cameras. (Don't save THOSE movies uncompressed!) See the Sensor Spec.