- Computer Vision gives machines the power to see, analyze and explore the world, just like humans! Thanks to Machine Learning and Deep Learning algorithms.
- This powerful technology has very quickly found applications into multiple industries. Hence, Computer Vision has became an indispensable part of technological development and digital transformation of the modern world.
- Let us explore the different avenues in which these industries benefit themselves from the use of Computer Vision systems:
Transportation
- Autonomous vehicles, which includes self-driving cars, unmanned drones, unmanned underwater vehicles etc. are no longer science fiction. In-fact a wide range of companies all over the world are already building, testing and improvising on their autonomous vehicle products.
- In autonomous vehicles, Computer Vision is used to sense and classify the objects it detects in its surroundings. It also interprets the objects and make decisions based on the kind of objects detected.
- For example, if a self-driving car detects a pedestrian then it should stop, if it detects a green signal then it should move, if it detects a moving car then it must judge its motion and drive accordingly, etc.
Healthcare and Disease Detection
- Medical records of patients, especially images for x-rays, MRI, scans, CT scans etc. contain a great wealth of information that can be utilized to detect a huge range of diseases and medical anomalies in patients.
- Earlier, medical professionals were forced to manually go through all of these medical imaging data for the benefit of their patients.
- Thankfully, adoption of computer vision technologies has enabled doctors to automate the process of medical image analysis, thus increasing their efficiency as well as accuracy in disease detection.
- Other uses of computer vision in healthcare:
- Cancer Detection- Ex: Analyzing moles to detect potential cancer cells
- Blood loss measurement: Ex: Measuring blood loss during childbirth by analyzing images of surgical sponges and suction containers.
- Pose Estimation- Analyze patient movement/poses and assist doctors in diagnosing neurological and musculoskeletal diseases.
- However, the computer vision systems are currently not powerful enough to entirely replace a medical professional but we are slowly making strides in that direction.
Manufacturing
Manufacturing industry is a field where there is a lot of potential for automation. This can lead to maximization of production efficiency, minimization of safety hazards and autonomy in quality control.
Let us look at a few examples:
- Inspection of Defects:
Large-scale manufacturing sites often struggle to achieve good accuracy in defect detection in their manufactured goods.
Camera-based systems can collect real-time data and leverage computer vision and machine learning algorithms to analyze those images to ensure a predefined set of quality standards. - Reading Texts and Barcodes:
Most products manufactured today have barcodes on their packaging. A computer vision technique called OCR (Optical Character Recognition) can be successfully applied to automatically detect, verify, convert and translate barcodes into readable text.
- Product Assembly:
Computer vision generates 3D modeling designs, guides robots as well as human workers, identifies & tracks product components, and helps to maintain packaging standards. Technology companies like Tesla have already automated more than 70% of its manufacturing processes.
Agriculture
Agriculture is a very labor intensive industry and hence has a great potential to benefit from automation led by computer vision systems. Computer vision systems are used in multiple areas of agriculture as follows:
- Crop and Yield Monitoring: Traditionally, crop growth monitoring is completely based on human judgement. However this is neither efficient nor in time. Also it can be carried out manually only once in a while.
Computer Vision allows for continuous, real-time monitoring of crop growth, and detection of any changes in crops due to malnutrition or disease. This can be done frequently, fast and with very high accuracy by computer vision systems. - Insect Detection: Tonnes and tonnes crops are destroyed every year by insects that can feed on entire stocks of crops overnight.
Camera-based crop monitoring systems can recognize and prevent insects attacking the crop in real-time, thus preventing destruction of crops.
- Computer vision is also used in other industries like construction, retail, security and many more. Each of these industries have multiple area of applications and this will only increase in the coming years.