Tuesday, December 2, 2008

What’s so hard about machine vision?

How do you respond when a customer, or your boss, looks at your machine vision demonstration and says, “That looks pretty easy.”?

My approach is to resist the urge to wrap a camera cable around his neck and instead, smile through gritted teeth while mumbling something like, “Every vision project has its own challenges.”

So here’s a reader challenge: stop what you’re doing and take a piece of paper. Divide it in half vertically then label the left side “Easy” and the right side “Difficult”. Under each heading list down the machine vision tasks that apply. So if you think OCR is easy, put that under the “easy” heading.

How does your list look?

Check back tomorrow and I’ll show you mine.

1 comment:

L. Venkata Subramaniam said...

Anything looks easy after it is done! Indeed machine vision is still research technology. I like your approach.

I would greatly appreciate your comments on how to improve surveillance using machine vision after the recent terror attacks in Mumbai.