Computer vision is a micro field of study in Artificial Intelligence that aims to provide a vision to the computer. In this study, they are developing technologies that allow computers to understand digital images like videos and photos.
Although it is trivially a simple problem that is solved by children and people, the lack of understanding of biological vision, infinitely changing physical world, and vision perception complexity have made it unsolved till the date.
The need for computers to see
In this digital era, images almost exist everywhere. After the great enhancements of cameras in smartphones, it has never been so easy before to take pictures and share it to the world. Due to this revolutionary change, modern content-based platforms like Instagram are growing incredibly.
Moreover, this also has led to YouTube becoming the second largest search engine. More than 100’s of video content is uploaded on YouTube every hour. Furthermore, more than a billion videos are being watched every single day.
In a nutshell, the internet is just a combination of text and images. You may find it easier to rank your text on the internet. However, if you want to rank your images, you need to explain the context of your image to search engines.
The person who uploads that image needs to describe the content using meta descriptions and alt tags. Therefore, to make the best use of visual data, we must provide computers the ability to see with the help of AI.
Talking about human intelligence, it is a basic problem because even a kid can:
- Recognize faces after seeing them once
- Explain the content of an image after seeing it once
- Explain the summary of a video after watching it once
With that said, we are required to provide this kind of human intelligence to the computers in order to allow them to understand videos and images.
How it impacts our daily life?
For the very first time, when people began utilizing computers, they were keen to know the capabilities of this new technology. However, people were only able to use it as an enhanced version of a typewriter.
In today’s era, it has become a vital asset of almost all organizations. Moreover, it has also become an integral part of people’s daily life. Talking about their capabilities, they provide endless functions and make a lot of tasks easier for us.
Scientists, inventors, and people who Learn Machine Learning are constantly finding possibilities to make computers even better and efficient. Computer vision is one such area that is under development with a bright future ahead.
A report by science daily states that computer vision is one of the fastest-growing fields of technology in machine learning. In this aspect, the discipline of science is about both development and theory.
We need to make computers that can read information from multi-dimensional data as well as images. Due to this, it is different from the other areas of artificial intelligence. Since artificial intelligence pays attention to perform a specific task or action in a fixed environment.
That too is done on the basis of the input provided by the operator. On the other hand, computer vision is a field that emphasizes more on the machine to input data on its own with the help of a visionary sensor that allows them to get information about their environment.
This can also be related to pattern recognition and the techniques of learning for the artificial intelligence future. In an article by Techopedia, it is explained that computer vision is not just about how a machine views an object.
It is about the data that is being processed and the output that is being produced after the consumption of the input. It is also about the way data is used by the machine to do productive tasks as well as actions.
Real-life examples of computer vision
The most prominent example of an important use of computer vision technology is to help car drivers react instantly to a situation. In such a case, computer vision can perform the same tasks as that of a human.
In case a car is installed with computer vision, it can easily scan and identify the objects around the road. After that, it can provide information to the driver about the objects blocking the way. This could even help to prevent accidents and collisions.
Talking about a human, when he sees an object in front of him, such as a person suddenly coming into the path of the car, he must give an instant reaction to save the person’s life. The reaction includes tasks such as object identification, processing, and making a decision.
The goal and mission of computer vision is to allow computers to perform such a complex and cognitive process and make a decision out of it in the same way a human does. An article from the next web explains really well about this process.
According to the article, the approach of teaching computers to identify objects is similar to that of teaching a human child to identify things. In both of these cases, the neural network projects are being utilized to identify objects and understand the complexity of the process.
Getting back to computer vision, it is comparatively easier to allow a computer to recognize an image. However, it is harder to allow a computer to learn about the environment of the image. Moreover, if the image is presented in a new way, it won’t be able to recognize it.
Therefore, in order to provide an understanding of the physical universe to artificial intelligence, we need to provide it training as a child. You may have observed that children need to see the picture of letters and numbers while learning about them to understand it.
After that, when they start recognizing the image, they can still identify it even if it is kept upside down. Eventually, with time, the biological neural network of a child starts developing. Due to this, they can even identify the letter even if it is presented in an unexpected way to them.
This is how the interpretation of data works for humans. That’s the only place where scientists are having difficulty in adopting image recognition with artificial intelligence. If you represent the image in the same way as before to a computer, it will easily recognize it.
However, if you make changes in the image and represent it in a manner not expected by the computer, a computer will not be able to recognize the image due to the lack of understanding of the physical universe.
Overcoming the challenges
Scientists are trying their level best to overcome the challenge of understanding images presented in an unexpected manner. For this, they are providing pictures of a particular object in a large number of different manners to a computer.
After that, they are allowing the computer to assess the pixels of the picture. After that, when they are presented with a picture of the same object in a different manner, they analyze the pixelated data of the picture and compare it to the previous image’s pixel data.
Due to this, if the particular object is presented in a completely unrecognizable manner, it can still determine if it is the same object as the previous one by analyzing the pixel data. According to Forbes, the very first experiment in computer vision began in the 1950s.
Under this technology, the possibilities of projects are endless. The market share for this technology is said to be around $48.6 billion by the end of 2022. Even though the self-driving cars are the most talked-about features of the computers, it is just a small use for this technology.
China, on the other hand, is leading the uses of computer vision by employing it in facial recognition technology. The typical examples of areas that include facial recognition are theft prevention, facial recognition, police work, and airport security checkpoints.
An example of a project for the use of computer vision by normal people is to integrate it with Google translate. By using this, people can translate the signs in different languages in foreign countries by taking a photograph or scanning the sign.
Computer vision also has a bright future in the healthcare industry. As you may already know, the majority of the medical data is based on images. In that case, the technology of computer vision can be very handy for the healthcare industry.
It can be used for scans, diagnostic methods, mammogram interpreting, and even X-rays. Furthermore, it can even help in identifying and addressing a particular ailment faster and with better accuracy. It can even help healthcare professionals by assisting them in surgeries.
It can also benefit the manufacturing and agriculture sector in a great way. Talking about the agricultural industry, there is already plenty of machinery that is using the technology of computer vision to determine the quality of grains and determine the best soil for farming.
If you are looking at upskilling and advancing your career in the field of AI and Machine Learning, do check out Great Learning’s Post Graduate Program in AIML. There are many other free certificate courses as well offered by Great Learning.
