Brief History of Computer Vision

Source: Google

As any other technology the world has ever witnessed, Computer Vision did not come to us as a revelation just over night. What we see or know about Computer Vision and it's related fields are results of several years of  research and hard work. The first such works started in the 1960s. By then, light capturing digital hardware has already been invented paving the way for scientists and engineers to tackle the challenge of Computer Vision.

1964

Defense contractors Woody Bledsoe, Helen Chan Wolf and Charles Bison launch a facial recognition system for an unnamed intelligence agency. Further developments and iterations went on to change how governments and security bodies such as police match and identify citizens and also suspects from ID photographs stored in their national databases.

1966

Minsky assigns computer vision as an undergrad summer project. The first attempt to solve this problem was made by Seymour Paper. Though this attempt was not as successful as intended, this got scientists and engineers talking.

1970's

This decade saw some progress on interpreting selected images. One advancement was UK Police inventing a license-plate recognition system in 1976 which was deployed around London in 1993 to counteract the threat of IRA bombings.

1980's

Researches attempt using Artificial Neural Networks in Computer Vision to allow for better image recognition but however they quickly abandoned the study as it deemed too difficult with the limited resources of the time. There was a shift toward geometry and mathematica rigor. This decade saw one of the very first beginnings of Vehicle Autonomy using Computer Vision developed by Lockheed Martin, Carnegie Mellon and others. It is a land vehicle that uses video based imaging to follow a road at just 3 mph.

1990's

This decade can be said as the actual birth of Computer Vision that saw the return of Artificial Neural Networks in Computer Vision research under the name, Convolutional Neural Networks and were able to solve a challenging for the time problem, that is digit recognition for bank cheques. It also saw further advancements in Facial Recognition and statistical analysis in vogue.

2000's

Source: Google Images

Reached new heights in object recognition due to the availability of large annotated datasets and video processing began. In 2004, Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity uses Computer Vision to land successfully in Mars. The first 3D pizza system called called the "Scorpion" builds a 3D profile of 7,200 products per hour using multiple cameras.

2010's

Source: Google Images

Computer Vision began to be deployed in a number of web applications and mobile apps and saw these technologies reach a wider user base. Microsoft Releases Kinect in 2010, a motion sensing camera that can track 20 human features at 30 times per second. Google starts testing it's autonomous cars which uses cameras, LIDAR and artificial intelligence to navigate unassisted in 2012. In 2014, smartphone processors become powerful enough for pattern recognition. Many mobile photography applications could automatically enhance photos and suggest best taken photos from a session of photo shoot.

Today, computer vision is rapidly being utilised in almost every field from, social to health applications, entertainment industry and also military drones and further research is being made in the field. What we are witnessing is the Golden Age of Computer Vision.

References:
https://tordivelblog.com/2014/06/23/scorpion-3d-pizza-sorter-57-years-of-machine-vision-history/
https://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs143/lectures/01.pdf
http://www.egavves.com/category/home/#sthash.PtZp3lvq.dpbs
http://www.consciousentities.com/minsky.htm