The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to computer vision:
Computer vision – interdisciplinary field that deals with how computers can be made to gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to automate tasks that the human visual system can do. [1] [2] [3] Computer vision tasks include methods for acquiring digital images (through image sensors), image processing, and image analysis, to reach an understanding of digital images. In general, it deals with the extraction of high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical or symbolic information that the computer can interpret. The image data can take many forms, such as video sequences, views from multiple cameras, or multi-dimensional data from a medical scanner. As a technological discipline, computer vision seeks to apply its theories and models for the construction of computer vision systems. As a scientific discipline, computer vision is concerned with the theory behind artificial systems that extract information from images.
Computer vision tasks include methods for acquiring, processing, analyzing and understanding digital images, and extraction of high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical or symbolic information, e.g. in the forms of decisions. Understanding in this context means the transformation of visual images into descriptions of the world that make sense to thought processes and can elicit appropriate action. This image understanding can be seen as the disentangling of symbolic information from image data using models constructed with the aid of geometry, physics, statistics, and learning theory.
Image analysis or imagery analysis is the extraction of meaningful information from images; mainly from digital images by means of digital image processing techniques. Image analysis tasks can be as simple as reading bar coded tags or as sophisticated as identifying a person from their face.
Computational photography refers to digital image capture and processing techniques that use digital computation instead of optical processes. Computational photography can improve the capabilities of a camera, or introduce features that were not possible at all with film-based photography, or reduce the cost or size of camera elements. Examples of computational photography include in-camera computation of digital panoramas, high-dynamic-range images, and light field cameras. Light field cameras use novel optical elements to capture three dimensional scene information which can then be used to produce 3D images, enhanced depth-of-field, and selective de-focusing. Enhanced depth-of-field reduces the need for mechanical focusing systems. All of these features use computational imaging techniques.
The scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) is a computer vision algorithm to detect, describe, and match local features in images, invented by David Lowe in 1999. Applications include object recognition, robotic mapping and navigation, image stitching, 3D modeling, gesture recognition, video tracking, individual identification of wildlife and match moving.
Scale-space theory is a framework for multi-scale signal representation developed by the computer vision, image processing and signal processing communities with complementary motivations from physics and biological vision. It is a formal theory for handling image structures at different scales, by representing an image as a one-parameter family of smoothed images, the scale-space representation, parametrized by the size of the smoothing kernel used for suppressing fine-scale structures. The parameter in this family is referred to as the scale parameter, with the interpretation that image structures of spatial size smaller than about have largely been smoothed away in the scale-space level at scale .
In computer vision and image processing, a feature is a piece of information about the content of an image; typically about whether a certain region of the image has certain properties. Features may be specific structures in the image such as points, edges or objects. Features may also be the result of a general neighborhood operation or feature detection applied to the image. Other examples of features are related to motion in image sequences, or to shapes defined in terms of curves or boundaries between different image regions.
The following are common definitions related to the machine vision field.
Structure from motion (SfM) is a photogrammetric range imaging technique for estimating three-dimensional structures from two-dimensional image sequences that may be coupled with local motion signals. It is studied in the fields of computer vision and visual perception.
In computer vision, visual descriptors or image descriptors are descriptions of the visual features of the contents in images, videos, or algorithms or applications that produce such descriptions. They describe elementary characteristics such as the shape, the color, the texture or the motion, among others.
In computer vision, speeded up robust features (SURF) is a patented local feature detector and descriptor. It can be used for tasks such as object recognition, image registration, classification, or 3D reconstruction. It is partly inspired by the scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) descriptor. The standard version of SURF is several times faster than SIFT and claimed by its authors to be more robust against different image transformations than SIFT.
The histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) is a feature descriptor used in computer vision and image processing for the purpose of object detection. The technique counts occurrences of gradient orientation in localized portions of an image. This method is similar to that of edge orientation histograms, scale-invariant feature transform descriptors, and shape contexts, but differs in that it is computed on a dense grid of uniformly spaced cells and uses overlapping local contrast normalization for improved accuracy.
In computer vision, the bag-of-words model sometimes called bag-of-visual-words model can be applied to image classification or retrieval, by treating image features as words. In document classification, a bag of words is a sparse vector of occurrence counts of words; that is, a sparse histogram over the vocabulary. In computer vision, a bag of visual words is a vector of occurrence counts of a vocabulary of local image features.
Object recognition – technology in the field of computer vision for finding and identifying objects in an image or video sequence. Humans recognize a multitude of objects in images with little effort, despite the fact that the image of the objects may vary somewhat in different view points, in many different sizes and scales or even when they are translated or rotated. Objects can even be recognized when they are partially obstructed from view. This task is still a challenge for computer vision systems. Many approaches to the task have been implemented over multiple decades.
Object detection is a computer technology related to computer vision and image processing that deals with detecting instances of semantic objects of a certain class in digital images and videos. Well-researched domains of object detection include face detection and pedestrian detection. Object detection has applications in many areas of computer vision, including image retrieval and video surveillance.
Pedestrian detection is an essential and significant task in any intelligent video surveillance system, as it provides the fundamental information for semantic understanding of the video footages. It has an obvious extension to automotive applications due to the potential for improving safety systems. Many car manufacturers offer this as an ADAS option in 2017.
Image color transfer is a function that maps (transforms) the colors of one (source) image to the colors of another (target) image. A color mapping may be referred to as the algorithm that results in the mapping function or the algorithm that transforms the image colors. The image modification process is sometimes called color transfer or, when grayscale images are involved, brightness transfer function (BTF); it may also be called photometric camera calibration or radiometric camera calibration.
CVIPtools is a development suite for image processing. Recent versions are available for free for Windows, while older versions are available for Unix and Linux systems as well. The program is used for both image processing and computer vision applications, with an emphasis on processing multiple images at a time. It contains multiple tools used for image processing.
Oriented FAST and rotated BRIEF (ORB) is a fast robust local feature detector, first presented by Ethan Rublee et al. in 2011, that can be used in computer vision tasks like object recognition or 3D reconstruction. It is based on the FAST keypoint detector and a modified version of the visual descriptor BRIEF (Binary Robust Independent Elementary Features). Its aim is to provide a fast and efficient alternative to SIFT.
In computer vision, rigid motion segmentation is the process of separating regions, features, or trajectories from a video sequence into coherent subsets of space and time. These subsets correspond to independent rigidly moving objects in the scene. The goal of this segmentation is to differentiate and extract the meaningful rigid motion from the background and analyze it. Image segmentation techniques labels the pixels to be a part of pixels with certain characteristics at a particular time. Here, the pixels are segmented depending on its relative movement over a period of time i.e. the time of the video sequence.
In computer vision, a saliency map is an image that highlights the region on which people's eyes focus first. The goal of a saliency map is to reflect the degree of importance of a pixel to the human visual system. For example, in this image, a person first looks at the fort and light clouds, so they should be highlighted on the saliency map. Saliency maps engineered in artificial or computer vision are typically not the same as the actual saliency map constructed by biological or natural vision.