For a time, computer vision was artificial intelligence’s answer to personal jetpacks: a lot of bold promises and relatively little progress toward the realization of functional technology. Then along came the development of deep neural networks, which has driven more advancement over the past 10 years than the field had seen across its previous generations of existence.
Considering the recent leaps made in computer vision – from virtual science fiction to an industry-leading science capable of bettering lives across the globe – it’s interesting to think about what more visual AI may deliver us in the future. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s first tip our caps to some of the top computer vision tech that’s already helping our systems move faster, achieve better accuracy and keep us safer:
- Security video cameras. The public has been seeing some version of facial recognition surveillance in film and television for years now, often at a sophisticated level that outpaced the actual power of the technology at the time. Well, the future has arrived. With advanced face-detection algorithms found in everything from your smartphone to apps like Snapchat to airport security cameras, computer vision now has tremendous identification capabilities – to the point that pandemic-proof surveillance systems can now ID people wearing a mask.
- Document recognition and identification. Our bread and butter at TackleAI. We’re able to identify, classify and process unstructured data across a wide variety of document types, including invoices, memos and emails. Now human resource and information teams in business, government agencies and more have the ability to process mind-boggling amounts of data in fractions of the time they once did, reducing labor, streamlining workflows and enhancing operations across the board. Oh, and did we mention that it saves money, too?
- Self-driving cars. The go-to example when the subject of computer vision arises. In autonomous vehicles, sensor technology identifies and learns objects around the car – from pedestrians to other cars to things that shouldn’t be on the road. It also spots lane lines, contours and terrain to adjust self-driving settings accordingly and train deep learning models. As these models are fed more information over time, autonomous vehicles will only become safer for the passengers in them and all their surroundings.
- Drone technology. The military has been using drone tech in a number of forms for years, and by now you know about Amazon drones that use computer vision to navigate safely to customer destinations to drop off sneakers, earbuds and other precious cargo. But autonomous flying tech is also being applied by surveyors, architects and even farmers, who can keep an eye on their land and crop conditions to optimize their yield.
- Healthcare. An incredibly encouraging area for the growth of visual artificial intelligence is in healthcare. Hospitals are improving accuracy and safety with better superior patient identification and more accurate and efficient image analysis. Additionally, the tech effectively supercharges the speed and efficiency of potentially life-saving and -extending medical research.
