Quantum Leap in Computer Vision: As Machines Acquire the Prime Human Sense

Since its advent in the 1970s, Computer Vision has been in a state of dormancy largely due to the fact that the Computation Power and Data that were required to bring this to life were just not there. But the early 2010s saw the first remarkable breakthrough in computer vision at the University of Toronto and the growth there on has been tremendous. A particular subclass of Neural Networks, the Convolutional Neural Networks(CNNs), have been the go-to choice for many Data Scientists ever since, having an application base ranging from Autonomous Vehicles to Healthcare with the footprint expanding across the spectrum by day. 

One of the major applications of computer vision comes in autonomous vehicles where from rudimentary tasks like lane identification and self parking, automobiles are about to achieve full autonomy. Tesla, owned by the renowned Elon Musk has made major strides in this and their aim is to make autonomous vehicles a commonplace, powered by computer vision based start ups.

Another field where computer vision plays a crucial role is Healthcare, where the Deep Learning based computer vision models are able to detect and predict ailments like cancer with an accuracy much superior to that achieved by humans. This could significantly reduce the human in the loop component, where tedious tasks like going through hundreds of histopathology images to detect cancer are done by CNNs with least latency. The application of computer vision is ever increasing in healthcare with the help of another technology known as Federated Learning that allows hospitals to use Artificial Intelligence models, like computer vision models, without having to share their data. 

Agriculture and Animal Husbandry have been benefiting considerably lately with the application of computer vision. Harvest time prediction is one area that has great potential for computer vision, where from video footage of crops, the harvest time could be predicted, enabling the farmers to plan their supply chain, manpower requirements and so on. Crop disease detection, quality analysis etc are some other applications. Computer vision in animal husbandry helps track the animal behaviour, which otherwise requires costly wearables and humans tracking their output continuously. 

The list of use cases of computer vision is a never ending one to which more is added every minute. This include Insurance, Shopping, Fashion to mention a few. 

Data Scientists at Curvelogics, the parent company of Data Science Academy, have been able to pull off some fabulous results with computer vision in the fields of Satellite imagery, Histopatholoy images, Augmented Reality platform, Crop Harvest prediction, Human activity detection etc.  

With Artificial Intelligence taking the world by a storm and computer vision moving forward with lightning pace, more applications and better performances are only a matter of time away. ‘Data Scientist’ has been termed as the hottest career option of 21st century, of which the role played by computer vision is beyond significant already and will keep on flourishing in the coming years.