When I was a graduate student in computer science in the early 2000s, computers were barely able to detect sharp edges in photographs, let alone recognize something as loosely defined as a human face.
If you know the shape of the lens and the image you get, you can work out the path that light followed between the object and your eye.
There is great potential to use computer vision technology in a constructive and benevolent way.
Yes, we have prototyped cars that can drive by themselves, but without smart vision, they cannot really tell the difference between a crumpled paper bag on the road, which can be run over, and a rock that size, which should be avoided.
In Silicon Valley, there are a lot of startups using computer vision for agriculture or shopping - there are a lot for clothes shopping. At Baidu, for example, if you find a picture of a movie star, we actually use facial recognition to identify that movie star and then tell you things like their age and hobbies.
We really believe that long-term, the way AI will drive is similar to the way humans drive - we don't break the problem down into objects and vision and localization and planning. But how long it will take us to get there is questionable.
The real use of AI in industry is generally for very narrow pattern-matchers - a better search algorithm, an object-detection algorithm, etc. These things are tools which we can use - for good or evil. But they're nothing like self-aware beings.
Understanding vision and building visual systems is really understanding intelligence.
At the World Cup, there is a constant risk that you might find a bag or some object that has been left behind, and no one is quite sure what it is. To bring in a full bomb-disposal team for each item can be very time-consuming. The PackBot can go over rough terrain, climb stairs, pick things up, and also be operated from a safe distance.
I think the way we're doing computer vision is just wrong.
Satellite datasets like WorldView can see objects as small as 1.5 feet in diameter. In 2014, WorldView-3 will be able to see objects a small as a foot.
There are cameras nowadays that have been developed to tell the difference between a squirrel and a bomb.
Computer vision and machine learning have really started to take off, but for most people, the whole idea of what is a computer seeing when it's looking at an image is relatively obscure.
My system uses the speed of components in cameras and cell phones to get four inches of depth through the brain.
One thing that humans still do better than computers is recognize images.
When a driverless car looks out on the world, it's not able to distinguish the age of a pedestrian or the number of occupants in a car.
Yes, iD is a machine vision and sensor browser for the physical world. That's what we have been working on with Coca-Cola, Verizon, Bank of America and Disney to launch content when an image is recognised.
A lot of the future of search is going to be about pictures instead of keywords. Computer vision technology is going to be a big deal.
