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

Microsoft webcam assistant

[Powercntrl]

It looks like you're trying to masturbate! Would you like me to load:

* Your porn collection
* An AIM conversation with a guy pretending to be female
* Recommended self pleasuring techniques database
* Featured lubricant merchants

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

Artificial intelligence in under 20 years

[CrazyJim0]

All you need is it to understand english, and imagine in a 3d space.

Type a sentence like Zork, and it makes the scene for you.

Give it a book, and it could turn it into a movie for you.

Vision recognition has a great many uses already, but when vision recognition matures, you'll be able to take a scene and reduce it into 3d reality space. You take the 3d reality space, and give the computer some goals, and its trying to accomplish something in the world.

Thing is, it won't stop at plain vision, you'll get infared, sonar, ultraviolet, radar, all that crap to get the best 3d image possible.

So since vision is progressing, the gap towards AI is shrinking. Also as video games become more realistic, the AI gap is shrinking. I could be bold and say 15 years from now we should have basic AI.