An Introduction to Computer Vision
Computer vision has become more and more prevalent and have already further impacted our daily lives with its applications in transportation (self-driving vehicles), healthcare, retail (like Amazon go) etc. Starting with the beginning of vision in general, this blog will talk about the brief history of computer vision along with some beginner friendly tools and its outlook for future development.
What is Vision?
Scientists believe that the earliest version of the eye can be found in single-celled organisms. As shown below, those red dots in euglena are called ‘eyespot’. They are made of photoreceptor proteins and are sensitive to light.
Of course, having an eyespot is not equivalent to having vision, as it does not enable distinguishing shapes, colors or determining the direction of light. But overtime, these single-celled creatures would evolve. And the eyespots would evolve with them. First, a depression would form around the eyespot and create a pit. This change makes it possible to roughly detect where the light is coming from. This opening would get smaller and smaller, eventually becoming like a pinhole camera. Now, sensing light direction is much…
