Computer Vision : Some different applications and use cases

After the seminar, i felt that the research projects show were created with great goals in mind. It might be ranging from solve macro problems in video/image processing to world changing vision of reducing traffic accidents.

Building on to this seminar, i would like to share some examples that i have came across and know about over the past few years.

Photosynth

The below embedded is Photosynth, a research project by Microsoft Research (sorry for the repeat). Photosynth deals with a traditional problem of representing 3D spaces with the collection of 2D images. The result is that you can recreated a 3D world if you have enough overlapped photos of a location or a single entity. The below "synth" was created when i was on a trip to san francisco's famous golden gate bridge. The great and exciting thing about photosynth is that i can recreate the space and it allows navigation controls such as to pan, look left, look right or even walk into the picture.

While is is a "touristy" kind of use for photosynth, in mission critical environment such as NASA, they adopt this technology at the space station. The staff would actually take numerous photos of the underside of a space shuttle to check for damage. Why? Because during re-entry to earth, if any of the thermal tiles are damaged, it might cause the whole shutter to blow up. The traditional method would be to take lots of pictures and manual match them or stitch them using a stitching application, however photosynth ease the job of doing so by recreating the 3D space, which can accurately pinpoint the location of any damage tile if seen. No, photosynth does not fix the damaged tile, you still have to get professional engineers to fix them manually.

Augmented Reality Application

Remember that i talked about location based services previously during the sharing session? Combined with a webcam, GPS and lots of geo-enabled data, you could do something as show below. Augmented reality such as the below example has been deemed as the "third" life. The virtual environment that exist within our real physical environment. Some use cases for augmented reality application can range from providing a guide service to tourist who are unfamiliar with a new environment, real estate, marketing/advertisement, military warfare and even to detail step by step instructions to public utilities workers on what to repair, where to repair and how to repair. 

Context Aware image resizing

3 is a charm. The last thing i would like to share would be another research project which photo enthusiast might find interesting. There is a classic problem of cropping images and resizing them. Often when we crop or resize pictures, we would have problem or cropping out entities which we want to keep, or photos are distorted (elongated) and the object would look out of proportion or simply funny. The context aware image resizing plays with the concept of energy levels. We understand that some portion of the picture might not be important, and hence it can be remove. The method of removal is rather complex, hence it's better to watch the video for a greater understand.