Week 5: Computer Vision for Artists and Designers

The topic of computer vision has been an increasingly popular idea, and I believe in the next couple years there will continue to be big leaps in its development and applications. To think that less than a decade ago computer vision was solely for the military and for those in higher education has now turn into a readily available technology for artists and the general public is amazing. As such, I really enjoy how the author presented the paper for beginners in computer vision and provided advice on how to approach projects with computer vision. The projects on tracking and surveillance were actually some of the projects that stuck with me the most throughout the reading. The Suicide Box project I felt on one hand sort of telling the story of the individual whom society, especially when their death wasn’t accounted for, but on the other hand super demoralizing because the project relies on the death of these individual. As such, I feel the capacity for tracking and surveillance for computer vision is a sensitive and difficult issue to uncover fully. There is of course a huge capacity and room for growth in the field of computer vision, however the ethnicity needs to be checked and balance with the morality and freedoms of individuals.

Through the reading, the author mentions how computer visions programs will need to be chosen mindful in order to optimally tackle the problem at hand. With complicated terms such as background subtract and frame differencing, I believe the complexity of differentiating between objects, backgrounds, and lighting is the biggest different from computer vision to human vision. As humans, we process millions of tiny information at once without noticing it and as programmers, the little things like recognizing an object are magnified as humans attempt to describe in code what that object is in computer language. Working with interactive media and computer vision for the rest of the semester, I believe the techniques regarding background subtraction and brightness tracking will play the biggest role in our projects. I feel many of our projects will rely on clear differentiating of human movements and interactions with the project. Without these techniques, I fear our projects may fall apart or not work as the screen would act as a camera and not a program which can be interacted with.

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