EXAMPLES OF APPLICATIONS FOR

COMPUTER VISION
One of the most prominent application fields is medical computer vision or medical image
processing. This area is characterized by the extraction of information from image data for the
purpose of making a medical diagnosis of a patient. Generally, image data is in the form of
microscopy images, X-ray images, angiography images, ultrasonic images, and tomography
images. An example of information which can be extracted from such image data is detection
of tumours, arteriosclerosis or other malign changes. It can also be measurements of organ
dimensions, blood flow, etc. This application area also supports medical research by providing
new information, e.g., about the structure of the brain, or about the quality of medical
treatments.

A second application area in computer vision is in industry. Here, information is extracted for
the purpose of supporting a manufacturing process. One example is quality control where
details or final products are being automatically inspected in order to find defects. Another
example is measurement of position and orientation of details to be picked up by a robot arm.

Military applications are probably one of the largest areas for computer vision. The obvious
examples are detection of enemy soldiers or vehicles and missile guidance. More advanced
systems for missile guidance send the missile to an area rather than a specific target, and
target selection is made when the missile reaches the area based on locally acquired image
data.
Modern military concepts, such as "battlefield awareness", imply that various sensors,
including image sensors, provide a rich set of information about a combat scene which can be
used to support strategic decisions. In this case, automatic processing of the data is used to
reduce complexity and to fuse information from multiple sensors to increase reliability.

One of the newer application areas is autonomous vehicles, which include submersibles, land-
based vehicles (small robots with wheels, cars or trucks), aerial vehicles, and unmanned aerial
vehicles (UAV). The level of autonomy ranges from fully autonomous (unmanned) vehicles to
vehicles where computer vision based systems support a driver or a pilot in various situations.
Fully autonomous vehicles typically use computer vision for navigation, i.e. for knowing where
it is, or for producing a map of its environment (SLAM) and for detecting obstacles. It can also
be used for detecting certain task specific events, e. g., a UAV looking for forest fires.
Examples of supporting systems are obstacle warning systems in cars, and systems for
autonomous landing of aircraft. Several car manufacturers have demonstrated systems for
autonomous driving of cars, but this technology has still not reached a level where it can be put
on the market. There are ample examples of military autonomous vehicles ranging from
advanced missiles, to UAVs for recon missions or missile guidance. Space exploration is
 already being made with autonomous vehicles using computer vision, e. g., NASA's Mars
Exploration Rover.

Other application areas include:

· Support of visual effects creation for cinema and broadcast, e.g., camera tracking
(matchmoving).
· Surveillance.

Typical tasks of computer vision

Each of the application areas described above employ a range of computer vision tasks; more
or less well-defined measurement problems or processing problems, which can be solved using
a variety of methods. Some examples of typical computer vision tasks are presented below.

Recognition

The classical problem in computer vision, image processing and machine vision is that of
determining whether or not the image data contains some specific object, feature, or activity.
This task can normally be solved robustly and without effort by a human, but is still not
satisfactorily solved in computer vision for the general case: arbitrary objects in arbitrary
situations. The existing methods for dealing with this problem can at best solve it only for
specific objects, such as simple geometric objects (e.g., polyhedrons), human faces, printed
or hand-written characters, or vehicles, and in specific situations, typically described in terms
of well-defined illumination, background, and pose of the object relative to the camera.

Different varieties of the recognition problem are described in the literature:

· Recognition: one or several pre-specified or learned objects or object classes can be

recognized, usually together with their 2D positions in the image or 3D poses in the
scene.
· Identification: An individual instance of an object is recognized. Examples:
identification of a specific person's face or fingerprint, or identification of a
specific vehicle.
· Detection: the image data is scanned for a specific condition. Examples: detection of
possible abnormal cells or tissues in medical images or detection of a vehicle in an
automatic road toll system. Detection based on relatively simple and fast computations is
sometimes used for finding smaller regions of interesting image data which can be
further analyzed by more computationally demanding techniques to produce a correct
interpretation.

Several specialized tasks based on recognition exist, such as:

 · Content-based image retrieval: finding all images in a larger set of images which have
a specific content. The content can be specified in different ways, for example in terms
of similarity relative a target image (give me all images similar to image X), or in terms
of high-level search criteria given as text input (give me all images which contains
many houses, are taken during winter, and have no cars in them).
· Pose estimation: estimating the position or orientation of a specific object relative to the
camera. An example application for this technique would be assisting a robot arm in
retrieving objects from a conveyor belt in an assembly line situation.
· Optical character recognition (or OCR): identifying characters in images of printed or
handwritten text, usually with a view to encoding the text in a format more amenable to
editing or indexing (e.g. ASCII).

Motion

Several tasks relate to motion estimation, in which an image sequence is processed to produce
an estimate of the velocity either at each points in the image or in the 3D scene. Examples of
such tasks are:

· Egomotion: determining the 3D rigid motion of the camera.

· Tracking: following the movements of objects (e.g. vehicles or humans).

Scene reconstruction

Given one or (typically) more images of a scene, or a video, scene reconstruction aims at
computing a 3D model of the scene. In the simplest case the model can be a set of 3D points.
More sophisticated methods produce a complete 3D surface model.

Image restoration

The aim of image restoration is the removal of noise (sensor noise, motion blur, etc.) from
images. The simplest possible approach for noise removal is various types of filters such as
low-pass filters or median filters. More sophisticated methods assume a model of how the
local image structures look like, a model which distinguishes them from the noise. By first
analysing the image data in terms of the local image structures, such as lines or edges, and then
controlling the filtering based on local information from the analysis step, a better level of
noise removal is usually obtained compared to the simpler approaches.

Computer vision systems

The organization of a computer vision system is highly application dependent. Some systems
are stand-alone applications which solve a specific measurement or detection problem, while
other constitute a sub-system of a larger design which, for example, also contains sub-
systems
 for control of mechanical actuators, planning, information databases, man-machine interfaces,
etc. The specific implementation of a computer vision system also depends on if its
functionality is pre-specified or if some part of it can be learned or modified during operation.
There are, however, typical functions which are found in many computer vision systems.

· Image acquisition: A digital image is produced by one or several image sensor which,
besides various types of light-sensitive cameras, includes range sensors, tomography
devices, radar, ultra-sonic cameras, etc. Depending on the type of sensor, the resulting
image data is an ordinary 2D image, a 3D volume, or an image sequence. The pixel
values typically correspond to light intensity in one or several spectral bands (gray
images or colour images), but can also be related to various physical measures, such as
depth, absorption or reflectance of sonic or electromagnetic waves, or nuclear
magnetic resonance.
· Pre-processing: Before a computer vision method can be applied to image data in
order to extract some specific piece of information, it is usually necessary to process the
data in order to assure that it satisfies certain assumptions implied by the method.
Examples are
o Re-sampling in order to assure that the image coordinate system is correct.
o Noise reduction in order to assure that sensor noise does not introduce
false information.
o Contrast enhancement to assure that relevant information can be detected.
o Scale-space representation to enhance image structures at locally
appropriate scales.
· Feature extraction: Image features at various levels of complexity are extracted
from the image data. Typical examples of such features are
o Lines, edges and ridges.
o Localized interest points such as corners, blobs or points.

More complex features may be related to texture, shape or motion.

· Detection/Segmentation: At some point in the processing a decision is made about

which image points or regions of the image are relevant for further processing.
Examples are
o Selection of a specific set of interest points
o Segmentation of one or multiple image regions which contain a specific object
of interest.
· High-level processing: At this step the input is typically a small set of data, for
example a set of points or an image region which is assumed to contain a specific
object. The remaining processing deals with, for example:
o Verification that the data satisfy model-based and application
specific assumptions.
o Estimation of application specific parameters, such as object pose or object size.
o Classifying a detected object into different categories.

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