

Computer Vision in the Real World – Why SIGGRAPH Probably Won’t Help You - splendidfailure
http://blog.bitgym.com/2013/09/computer-vision-in-the-real-world-why-siggraph-probably-wont-help-you/

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yetanotherphd
Great article. They very clearly describe the state of research in computer
vision. When I studied the field, I was very surprised at how shallow the
field was, in the sense that, as they put it, computer vision algorithms "are
generally only moderately sophisticated".

On the other hand, what they may not realize (and I know this as I have tried
making computer vision algorithms both before and after reading the
literature) is that while the computer vision literature may not contain a
solution to your problem, knowing the literature can be very useful in helping
to come up with your own solutions. There are a number of non-obvious themes
in computer vision that provide a basis for new algorithms. For example,
algorithms tend to be built from a pipeline in which the first stage is
feature detection.

EDIT: you should really watch the video, it's quite funny and cool.

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acgourley
OP here - Just wanted to say that I believe pipelined architecture is a
symptom of iterative research and is not necessarily good. I think the more
direct solution avoids pipelining in favor of a domain specific hack.

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yetanotherphd
Thanks for making that point. It still seems to me that most domain specific
solutions will still make use of many ideas from the CV literature. E.g.
looking at the last sections of your video it seems like you settled on a
histogram based approach, although I may be wrong.

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acgourley
I think you get a bag of tricks as you work on this stuff, for sure. But I
think they are more like the tricks artisans gather, share and re-use than
fundamental academic truths.

