Computer Vision(1)

I have been doing research in the field of vision since the last few years but a universal solution is nowhere to be seen; not only in my pockets but in any of the research institutes as well. Sometimes I feel it is impossible to find one universal solution to solving depth through stereo. Researchers have been thinking very deeply about just the stereo correspondence problem from many decades, but in vain. Either the problem is very difficult or we have missed the right track at the very beginning. I believe in either of these. The problem might be very difficult because it has taken its present shape through evolution, over millions of years. When I say evolution I refer to Darwin’s theory of “The survival of the fittest”. All these complex biological systems have taken rigorous stress test from nature and have survived to date, and to crack it might be a very challenging task. On the other side of the court we have man who has been able to build high speed miniature components and complex systems which should easily be able to replicate these relatively low speed systems. This is because biological vision is seen in small organisms like the insects, which hardly have say a few thousands of neurons dedicated for visual processing. Aren’t our GHz processors able to achieve what has evolved in these small creatures? After so much of research and thought at least I believe that it is impossible to achieve depth perception through the currently tried out image processing techniques. Towards the end of my discussion I will try to take you on a walk along what path I believe can solve this problem. It might not be practical as of today, but who knows what technology is waiting for us at the door. If the current image representation and processing techniques are so poor at achieving recognition, why are all those researchers glued to it even now? That’s because we always take our brain as reference for developing any recognition system and our brain is still able to perceive depth given a 2D stereo image pair. I believe the reader understands what a stereo image pair is. If not Google it right now! Or just skip it for now; I am going to take you all on a long journey covering each and every topic related to stereo images, depth perception, etc, etc. A lot of questions and answers were brought about during my research period and I have tried to give my best possible solutions to all of them. The whole idea behind writing these articles is to share these Q&A’s so that a person fascinated about vision today will be able to start off from a much thoughtful point rather than repeating the experiments again and again. To race against nature we have to make sure we compress those millions of years of evolution into a much smaller duration.