Computer vision is an extremely interesting concept, and emerging technologies significantly boost its development. Although the author mentioned that machines were not capable of doing ‘generalized’ visual input analysis and were heavily dependent on the specific set of programming techniques that would allow them to recognize only certain real-world scenes, I believe that soon (if not already), thanks to the rapid growth of AI, computers will be able to receive and process the information in a ‘general’ way without the need for the special setup in the software. Still, such a technology will probably not be widely applied at the beginning. In one of the Core classes that I recently took, we were talking a lot about Machine Learning, and one of the techniques that are used in that field with the purpose of computer vision enhancement is the Convolutional Neural Network, or CNN which learns by filtering the inputs of text, images and even sounds. Other techniques that were mentioned in the reading include brightness adjustment threshold, background subtraction, and frame differencing. All of them are described to be used to help a computer recognize the visual patterns and track changes in them, but I am sure that now there certainly exist some highly advanced technologies that, although probably based on the techniques described by the author, but still work much more efficiently and maybe incorporate a number of other methods simultaneously.
The development of computer vision is obviously a large step in our technological and scientific progress. It can be used for a lot of good things aimed at improving our lives. In healthcare, for example, it can be used to help doctors diagnose and treat patients or even assist them during surgeries. It is also widely used in self-driving vehicles, which can potentially improve road traveling conditions by making them much more regulated and safer. Computer vision can also be used for leisure activities and entertainment like games – I remember playing Xbox 360 with Kinect, a device that could track your motions and allow you to play some very cool games where you actually needed to jump and do some physical activities in real life, and they would affect the actions of your character in the game. As for Interactive Art, a great example of computer vision implementation is the installation that we recently saw in class, where you can catch the letters with your arms.
However, by implementing all these advanced technologies like motion and face recognition, we should always keep in mind the potential ethical issues that can arise as the line between interaction and privacy becomes more and more blurred. Not to mention, surveillance devices can also raise concerns among people as they become more and more ubiquitous and use high-level precision that is trained by analyzing hundreds of thousands of patterns of human facial expression, emotional behavior, etc. There are many questions that put in doubt the legitimacy of the development of such technologies as human rights can be at stake, but I guess such a discussion can last for a very long time. In my opinion, we just need to keep in mind that each of us can have different perspectives and attitudes toward computer vision, and this is completely normal.