Computer Vision
Computer Vision
1A-L1 Introduction
Outline
• What is computer vision?
• State of the art
• Why is this hard?
• Course overview
• Software
Why study Computer Vision?
• Images (and movies) have become ubiquitous in
both production and consumption.
• Therefore applications to manipulate images
(movies) are becoming core.
• As are systems that extract information from
imagery
• Surveillance
• Building 3D representations
• Motion capture assisted
Why study Computer Vision?
• But most of all…
Steve Seitz
Making sense of a picture
• We want to extract meaning out of an
image/sequence of images
• This is different from image processing, which
is mainly concerned with transforming images
• Image processing operations such as blurring,
thresholding etc. are often used as part of CV
algorithms
Making sense of a picture
• Look at this scene carefully…
Making sense of a picture
• What items could you identify? How did you
recognize them?
• What about other objects/spaces/time of day
etc.?
Current state of the art
• Can computers match (or beat) human vision?
• Yes and no (but mostly no!)
• Humans are much better at “hard” things
• Computers can be better at “easy” things
• Though getting really good at labeling using
machine learning techniques. Only a little on that in
this course.
Steve Seitz
Current state of the art
• The next slides show some examples of what
current vision systems can do
Optical character recognition (OCR)
Technology to convert scanned docs to text
If you have a scanner, it probably came with OCR
software
Steve Seitz
Face detection and more…
Steve Seitz
Earth viewers (3D modeling)
Edward Adelson
Really?
Edward Adelson
Really!
Edward Adelson
Vision is NOT Image Processing
• In the previous example, the two squares have
exactly the same measurement of intensity.
• So, seeing is not the same as measuring
properties in the image.
• Rather, “seeing” is building a percept of what is
in the world based upon the measurements
made by an imaging sensor.
Building models from change (1)
Michael Black
Building models from change (1)
Dan Kersten
http://vision.psych.umn.edu/users/kersten/kersten-lab/shadows.html
Building models from change (3)
Dan Kersten
http://vision.psych.umn.edu/users/kersten/kersten-lab/shadows.html
Interpreting images
• The previous example is one where the human
system is again “wrong” – nothing is moving
upwards. But feels like the best interpretation.
• Our goal is to develop your understanding of
some of what it takes to go from image to
interpretation.
Course overview
A little bit of pedagogy…
A little bit of pedagody…
Computational Models (Math!)
A little bit of pedagody…
Computational Models (Math!)
Algorithm
A little bit of pedagogy…
Computational Models (Math!)
Introduction
to Computer
Vision