CS 143:

Introduction to Computer Vision

Instructor: James Hays

TAs: Hari Narayanan (HTA), Libin “Geoffrey” Sun,
Greg Yauney, Bryce Aebi, Charles Yeh, Kurt Spindler
Image by
[Link]
 Today’s Class
• Introductions
• What is Computer Vision?
• Computer Vision at Brown
• Specifics of this course
• Questions
A bit about me
Thesis: Large Scale Scene Matching for Graphics and Vision
 Scene Completion

[Hays and Efros. Scene Completion Using Millions of Photographs.

SIGGRAPH 2007 and CACM October 2008.]
Nearest neighbor scenes from
database of 2.3 million photos
Graph cut + Poisson blending
My Research

An Empirical Study of Context in Object Detection

Categories of the SUN database
 CS 143 TAs

Hari Narayanan (HTA)

Libin “Geoffrey” Sun
Greg Yauney
Bryce Aebi
Charles Yeh
Kurt Spindler
 What is Computer Vision?
• What are examples of computer vision being
used in the world?
Computer Vision
Make computers understand images and
video.

What kind of scene?

Where are the cars?

How far is the

building?

…
Vision is really hard

• Vision is an amazing feat of natural

intelligence
– Visual cortex occupies about 50% of Macaque brain
– More human brain devoted to vision than anything else

Is that a
queen or a
bishop?
Why computer vision matters

Safety Health Security

Comfort Fun Access

Ridiculously brief history of computer vision
• 1966: Minsky assigns computer vision
as an undergrad summer project
• 1960’s: interpretation of synthetic
worlds
Guzman ‘68
• 1970’s: some progress on interpreting
selected images
• 1980’s: ANNs come and go; shift toward
geometry and increased mathematical
rigor
• 1990’s: face recognition; statistical Ohta Kanade ‘78
analysis in vogue
• 2000’s: broader recognition; large
annotated datasets available; video
processing starts
• 2030’s: robot uprising?
Turk and Pentland ‘91
 How vision is used now
• Examples of state-of-the-art

Some of the following slides by Steve Seitz

Optical character recognition (OCR)
Technology to convert scanned docs to text
• If you have a scanner, it probably came with OCR software

Digit recognition, AT&T labs License plate readers

[Link] [Link]
Face detection

• Many new digital cameras now detect faces

– Canon, Sony, Fuji, …
Smile detection

Sony Cyber-shot® T70 Digital Still Camera

3D from thousands of images

Building Rome in a Day: Agarwal et al. 2009

Object recognition (in supermarkets)

LaneHawk by EvolutionRobotics
“A smart camera is flush-mounted in the checkout lane, continuously
watching for items. When an item is detected and recognized, the
cashier verifies the quantity of items that were found under the basket,
and continues to close the transaction. The item can remain under the
basket, and with LaneHawk,you are assured to get paid for it… “
Vision-based biometrics

“How the Afghan Girl was Identified by Her Iris Patterns” Read the story
wikipedia
Login without a password…

Face recognition systems now

Fingerprint scanners on
beginning to appear more widely
many new laptops, [Link]
other devices
Object recognition (in mobile phones)

Point & Find, Nokia

Google Goggles
Special effects: shape capture

The Matrix movies, ESC Entertainment, XYZRGB, NRC

Special effects: motion capture

Pirates of the Carribean, Industrial Light and Magic

Sports

Sportvision first down line

Nice explanation on [Link]

[Link]
Smart cars Slide content courtesy of Amnon Shashua

• Mobileye
– Vision systems currently in high-end BMW, GM,
Volvo models
– By 2010: 70% of car manufacturers.
 Google cars

Oct 9, 2010. "Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic". The New York Times. John
Markoff
June 24, 2011. "Nevada state law paves the way for driverless cars". Financial Post.
Christine Dobby
Aug 9, 2011, "Human error blamed after Google's driverless car sparks five-vehicle
crash". The Star (Toronto)
Interactive Games: Kinect
• Object Recognition:
[Link]
• Mario: [Link]
• 3D: [Link]
• Robot: [Link]
Vision in space

NASA'S Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this westward view from atop
a low plateau where Spirit spent the closing months of 2007.

Vision systems (JPL) used for several tasks

• Panorama stitching
• 3D terrain modeling
• Obstacle detection, position tracking
• For more, read “Computer Vision on Mars” by Matthies et al.
Industrial robots

Vision-guided robots position nut runners on wheels

Mobile robots

NASA’s Mars Spirit Rover

[Link] [Link]

Saxena et al. 2008

STAIR at Stanford
Medical imaging

Image guided surgery

3D imaging
Grimson et al., MIT
MRI, CT
Computer Vision and Nearby Fields
• Computer Graphics: Models to Images
• Comp. Photography: Images to Images
• Computer Vision: Images to Models
 Computer Vision at Brown

Pedro Felzenszwalb James Hays Erik Sudderth

Thomas Serre Stu Geman David Mumford Gabriel Taubin

David Cooper Ben Kimia Joe Mundy

See also: Brown Center for Vision Research (CVR)

 Course Syllabus (tentative)
• [Link]
 Grading
• 80% programming projects (5 total)
• 20% quizzes (2 total)
 Computer Vision Robotics

Machine
Learning
Scope of CS 143 Human Computer
Interaction

Image Processing
Graphics
Feature Matching Medical Imaging
Recognition
Computational
Photography
Neuroscience

Optics
 Course Topics
• Interpreting Intensities
– What determines the brightness and color of a pixel?
– How can we use image filters to extract meaningful information from the
image?
• Correspondence and Alignment
– How can we find corresponding points in objects or scenes?
– How can we estimate the transformation between them?
• Grouping and Segmentation
– How can we group pixels into meaningful regions?
• Categorization and Object Recognition
– How can we represent images and categorize them?
– How can we recognize categories of objects?
• Advanced Topics
– Action recognition, 3D scenes and context, human-in-the-loop vision…
 Textbook

[Link]
 Prerequisites
• Linear algebra, basic calculus, and probability
• Experience with image processing or Matlab will help
but is not necessary
 Projects
• Image Filtering and Hybrid Images
• Local Feature Matching
• Scene Recognition with Bag of Words
• Object Detection with a Sliding Window
• Boundary Detection with Sketch Tokens
 Proj1: Image Filtering and Hybrid Images
• Implement image filtering to separate high and low
frequencies
• Combine high frequencies and low frequencies from different
images to create an image with scale-dependent
interpretation
 Proj2: Local Feature Matching
• Implement interest point detector, SIFT-like local feature
descriptor, and simple matching algorithm.
• Feed feature matches to a structure-from-motion system
 Proj3: Scene Recognition with Bag of Words

• Quantize local features into a “vocabulary”, describe images

as histograms of “visual words”, train classifiers to recognize
scenes based on these histograms.
 Proj4: Object Detection with a Sliding Window
• Train a face detector based on positive examples and “mined”
hard negatives, detect faces at multiple scales and suppress
duplicate detections.
 Proj5: Boundary Detection with Sketch Tokens
• Quantize human-annotated boundaries into “sketch tokens”,
train a multi-way classifier to recognize such tokens.