Computer Vision and Image Processing

Instructor: Bayisa G.

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What is Computer Vision ?

• Computer vision is a scientific field which deals with how computers can be made
as high level devices which understand digital images and videos.
• In terms of engineering, it is an automate task that the human visual system can do.
• As a scientific discipline, computer vision is related to the theory of artificial system
which can extract information from images.
• Computer vision has methods for acquiring, processing, analyzing and
understanding the digital image.
• The most important task is to extract high dimensional data from the real world
which can produce numerical or symbolic information.
• The image data is used in the form of video sequences which can be seen by a
human

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History of Computer Vision

• Computer vision is not a new technology because scientists and experts have been
trying to develop machines that can see and understand visual data for almost six
decades. The evolution of computer vision is classified as follows:
1. 1959: The first experiment with computer vision was initiated in 1959, where
they showed a cat as an array of images. Initially, they found that the system reacts
first to hard edges or lines, and scientifically, this means that image processing
begins with simple shapes such as straight edges.
2. 1960: In 1960, artificial intelligence was added as a field of academic study to
solve human vision problems.
2. 1963: This was another great achievement for scientists when they developed
computers that could transform 2D images into 3-D images.

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Cont..

4. 1974: This year, optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent character
recognition (ICR) technologies were successfully discovered.
• The OCR has solved the problem of recognizing text printed in any font or
typeface, whereas ICR can decrypt handwritten text. These inventions are one of
the greatest achievements in document and invoice processing, vehicle number
plate recognition, mobile payments, machine translation, etc.
5. 1982: In this year, the algorithm was developed to detect edges, corners, curves,
and other shapes. Further, scientists also developed a network of cells that could
recognize patterns.
6. 2000: In this year, scientists worked on a study of object recognition.

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Cont..

7. 2001: The first real-time face recognition application was developed.

8. 2010: The ImageNet data set became available to use with millions of tagged
images, which can be considered the foundation for recent Convolutional Neural
Network (CNN) and deep learning models.
9. 2012: CNN has been used as an image recognition technology with a reduced
error rate.
10. 2014: COCO has also been developed to offer a dataset for object detection and
support future research.

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 Cont..

– The goal of Computer Vision is to write computer programs that can interpret
images.
• Why study Computer Vision
ü Images ( and movies) have become ubiquitous in both production and
consumption
ü Therefore applications to manipulate images (movies) are becoming core.

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Cont..

ü As systems that extract information from imagery such as :

o Surveillance
o Building 3D representations
o Motion capture assisted
• But most of all …
o It is really deep and cool set of problems!

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What is Image?

– Practically, every scene which is around us forms an image and this involved
under image processing.
– An image is formed by two-dimensional analog and the digital signal that
contains color information arranged along x and y spatial axis.
– An Image, be it a digital or a still image, all of it is nothing but a binary
representation of some visual information.

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Cont..

– The visual information can be a simple:

• drawing
• Photo of organization or anything of this sort.
– All these digital graphed pictures, and recorded graphs,
• logos images have something in common.
– They all can be stored and saved for future use electronically in any storage
device.
– Listeners are represented with sample image with information inside it.
– To be more precise, this image is shot with a digital camera.

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Cont..

– This image is traffic sign, which gives information about the signals and signage
for the rides.
– This is a digital image and can be stored in any digital storage medium

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Related fields in CV

– Image Processing
• The study of the properties of operators that produce images from other
images.
– Pattern Recognition
» Typically refers to the recognition of structures in 2D images(usually without
reference to any underlying 3D information).

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– Photogrammetry
» The science of measurement through non-contact sensing, e.g. terrain maps
from satellite images
» Usually is more focused on accuracy issue than interpretation
– Computer Graphics
» Produce the plausible images

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Computer Vision Vs Image Processing

Computer Vision:
• In Computer Vision, computers or machines are made to gain high-level understanding from the
input digital images or videos with the purpose of automating tasks that the human visual system
can do. It uses many techniques and Image Processing is just one of them.
Image Processing
• Image Processing is the field of enhancing the images by tuning many parameter and features of
the images. So Image Processing is the subset of Computer Vision. Here, transformations are
applied to an input image and the resultant output image is returned. Some of these transformations
are- sharpening, smoothing, stretching etc.
• Now, as both the fields deal with working in visuals, i.e., images and videos, there seems to be lot
of confusion about the difference about these fields of computer science. In this article we will
discuss the difference between them.

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Difference between Image Processing and Computer Vision

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Application of Computer Vision(CV)

Special Effects
• Shape and motion capture are new techniques used in movies like Avatar to
animate digital characters by recording the movements played by a human
actor.
• In order to do that, we have to find the exact positions of markers on the
actor’s face in a 3D space, and then recreate them on the digital avatar.
3D Urban Modeling
• Taking pictures with a drone over a city can be used to render a 3D model of
the city.
• Computer vision is used to combine all the photos into a single 3D model.

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 Cont..

Scene Recognition
• It is possible to recognize the location where a photo was taken.
• For instance, a photo of a landmark can be compared to billions of photos on
google to find the best matches.
• We can then identify the best match and deduce the location of the photo.
Optical Character Recognition(OCR)
• One of the oldest successful applications of computer vision is to recognize
characters and numbers.
• This can be used to read zipcodes, or license plates.

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Cont..

Face Detection
• Face detection has been used for multiple years in cameras to take better pictures
and focus on the faces.
• Smile detection can allow a camera to take pictures automatically when the
subject is smiling.
• Face recognition is more difficult than face detection, but with the scale of today’s
data, companies like Facebook are able to get very good performance.
• Finally, we can also use computer vision for biometrics, using unique iris pattern
recognition or fingerprints.

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Application of Computer Vision(CV) …

Mobile Visual Search

• With computer vision, we can do a search on Google using an image as the query.
Self-Driving Cars
• Autonomous driving is one of the hottest applications of computer vision.
• Companies like Tesla, Google or General
• Motors compete to be the first to build a fully autonomous car.

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Application of Computer Vision(CV) …

• Medical Imaging
• Computer vision helps in MRI reconstruction, automatic pathology, diagnosis,
machine aided surgeries and more.
Augmented Reality(AR)/Virtual Reality(VR)
• Object occlusion (dense depth estimation), outside-in tracking, inside-out tracking
for virtual and augmented reality.
• Smartphones
• All the photo filters (including animation filters on social media), QR code
scanners, panorama construction, Computational photography, face detectors,
image detectors (Google Lens, Night Sight) that you use are computer vision
applications.
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Application of Computer Vision(CV) …

Internet
• Image search, image captioning, Ariel imaging for maps, video categorization and
more.
Retail: Amazon recently opened to the public the Amazon Go store where shoppers
need not wait in line at the checkout counter to pay for their purchases.
Healthcare
• Gauss Surgical has developed blood monitoring solutions that described to
estimate in real-time blood loss during medical situations.
• This solution, the website reports, maximizes transfusions and recognized
hemorrhage better than the human eye.

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Different Image Processing Examples

There are five main types of image processing:

1. Visualization - Find objects that are not visible in the image.
2. Recognition - Distinguish or detect objects in the image.
3. Sharpening and restoration - Create an enhanced image from the original image
4. Pattern recognition - Measure the various patterns around the objects in the
image.
5. Retrieval - Browse and search images from a large database of digital images
that are similar to the original image.

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Fundamental Steps in Image Processing

• There are two categories of the steps involved in the image processing
1. Methods whose input are images.
2. Methods whose outputs are attributes extracted from those images.

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Fundamental steps

Figure: Fundamental Steps in Digital Image

Processing
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Fundamental steps..

1. Image Acquisition:
• Is the first step in image processing.
• This step is also known as preprocessing in image processing.
• It involves retrieving the image from a source, usually a hardware-based
source..
2. Image Enhancement:
• the process of bringing out and highlighting certain features of interest in an
image that has been obscured.
• This can involve changing the brightness, contrast, etc.

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Fundamental steps..

3. Image Restoration
• is the process of improving the appearance of an image.
• However, unlike image enhancement, image restoration is done using certain
mathematical or probabilistic models.
4. Color Image Processing
• includes a number of color modeling techniques in a digital domain.
• This step has gained prominence due to the significant use of digital images
over the internet.

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Fundamental steps..

5. Wavelets and Multiresolution Processing

• Wavelets are used to represent images in various degrees of resolution.
• The images are subdivided into wavelets or smaller regions for data
compression and for pyramidal representation.
6. Compression
• is a process used to reduce the storage required to save an image or the
bandwidth required to transmit it.
• This is done particularly when the image is for use on the Internet.
• It has two major approaches
• Lossless Compression and Lossy Compression

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Fundamental steps..

7. Morphological Processing
• is a set of processing operations for morphing images based on their shapes.
8. Segmentation
• is one of the most difficult steps of image processing.
• It involves partitioning an image into its constituent parts or objects.
9. Representation and Description
• After an image is segmented into regions in the segmentation process, each
region is represented and described in a form suitable for further computer
processing.

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Fundamental steps..

• Representation deals with the image’s characteristics and regional properties.

• Description deals with extracting quantitative information that helps differentiate one
class of objects from the other.
10. Recognition
• Recognition assigns a label to an object based on its description.
11. Knowledge Base:
• Knowledge about a problem domain is coded into an image processing system in the
form of a knowledge base.
• This knowledge may be as simple as detailing regions of an image where the
information of the interest in known to be located.
• Thus, limiting search that has to be conducted in seeking the information.
• The knowledge base also can be quite complex such interrelated list of all major
possible defects in a materials inspection problem or an image database containing
high resolution satellite images of a region in connection with change detection
application.

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