Reading afterthoughts:
In “Computer Vision for Artists and Designers”, there are multiple interesting concepts and projects presented that piqued my interest heavily.
For starters, one term that caught my attention instantly was “computer vision techniques”. I did not expect the text to dive into this topic because my expectations when I dived into this was that the concept mentioned would be more related to the uses and applications of computer vision rather than proper explanation of how it works. As a Computer Science major, I was immediately shocked to discover that “there is no widely agreed-upon standard for representing the content of video”. Having worked with video myself, it never crossed my mind that there are multiple standards for handling the information of videos, which for many cases might be as bad as having no standard at all. Why? The problem relies on the level of understanding computers have. They have no knowledge on the content itself, but rather, they only know how to show it. In better ways, blurred, black and white, or whatever way you want, but they are not able to know if a person or a dog is there.
Instead of diving into AI and model training, I wanted to mention how interesting it is that older projects were able to work with computer vision even when there was no concept of artificial intelligence. It is not needed to teach the computer how to understand it, but we can start working by simply telling it how to recognize it. The simplest idea is detecting motion. By doing something as trivial as checking whether the frames changed, we can properly detect motion and movement. Even better, we can check how the pixels changed: if there was pixel A in position X, and that same pixel and neighbor pixels are found in position Y, then we can confidently guess that what pixel A and its neighbors portrayed moved from X to Y.
Overall, this reading was very enjoyable from the point of view of someone who loves coding and working with computer vision. It was interesting to see concepts that I could recognize, but at the same time exciting because I could learn new information about these exact topics.