Before reading the chapter, I thought computer vision would basically be all about how computers are taught to see the same way as humans. But I quickly realised that it’s much more complicated than that. I found this very interesting because when humans view an image they see it as a general, full picture thing. Us humans can understand what we are seeing and can identify it. Meanwhile a computer receives the image as pixels without knowing what they represent at first. The reading mentioned techniques that the computer programs. Some of those factors include frame referencing, to detect movement, background subtraction, to separate a person or object from the background, and brightness thresholding, to know the difference between lighter or darker things compared to their surroundings. By the end of the reading, I concluded that computer vision feels less like giving a computer human eyes and more like giving it specific rule for what it should pay attention to.
What caught my eye the most was how these tracking abilities can completely change interactive art. Computer vision can allow the viewers movement or position or even facial expressions to be become part of an artwork. Furthermore, someone can interact without using a mouse or keyboard. This reminded me of a field trip that I went to last year during comms lab. We went to team lab and interacted with so many exhibitions. One that came to mind is an artwork where it recognised our silhouettes and movements and made our bodies interact with the projected graphics on the wall or on the floor. I think this creates a much more immersive type of interaction because the artwork is technically communicating and responding to the person standing in front of it.
On the other hand, it’s still feels a bit uncomfortable thinking about how easily the same technology can become surveillance. The reading mentioned that computer vision can track people who willingly participate but can also observe people who may not even realise they’re being watched. A personal example that happens in our day-to-day life is our phones. Not only does it use face recognition to open our phones but some phones have the ability to see how close the phone is to your face, and will then notify the user to back away. So from what I gathered, computer vision can be either playful and creative but also makes me question privacy in a way. It makes me wonder how much information a computer should really be allowed to collect about us.