Five Learnings from 15 Years in Perception
tangramvision.com
Five Learnings from 15 Years in Perception
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Re: Five Learnings from 15 Years in Perception
#2Why is it that people working on spy tech never have an ethics section in there "what I've learnt" rumblings?
Re: Five Learnings from 15 Years in Perception
#3This article struck a personal note with me because around the same time (2008-2012) I was really getting into vision, and even got published as an undergrad for imaging sensor fusion work (...my first, only, and likely last only meaningful contribution to my species); while the wider MV/CV community was making incremental gains every few years (anyone else remember Histogram-of-Oriented-Gradients?), that's what they were: incremental (I also remember my research-supervisor recounting how the patent on SIFT probably held back the entire field by a decade or two, so yes - things were slow-moving...
...until a few years ago when:
> Computer vision has been consumed by AI.
...but "AI" is an unsatisfying reduction. What does it even mean? (and c'mon, plenty of non-NN CV techniques going back decades can be called "AI" today with a straight-face (for example, an adaptive pixel+contour histogram model for classifying very specific things).
My point is that computer-vision, as a field, *is* (an) artificial-intelligence: it has not been "consumed by AI". I don't want ephemeral fad terminology (y'know... buzzwords) getting in the way of what could have been a much better article.
Re: Five Learnings from 15 Years in Perception
#4Why is it that people working on spy tech never have an ethics section in there "what I've learnt" rumblings?
In a world of total surveillance, the difference between a police state and free society is who has access to the data and what laws are enforced preventing them abusing it.
The benefits of all this spy tech are great - if we manage it right. I mean telephone tapping is an example
Re: Five Learnings from 15 Years in Perception
#5This article struck a personal note with me because around the same time (2008-2012) I was really getting into vision, and even got published as an undergrad for imaging sensor fusion work (...my first, only, and likely last only meaningful contribution to my species); while the wider MV/CV community was making incremental gains every few years (anyone else remember Histogram-of-Oriented-Gradients?), that's what they…
I expect he just means deep and foundational models for vision, which is true: they dominate.
Re: Five Learnings from 15 Years in Perception
#6It's a fine balance between Not Invented Here syndrome vs. trying to hammer the square peg of off-the-shelf OSS into the round hole of the actual problem you're trying to solve.
For example they suggest ROS as a robust industry-ready software, which absolutely hasn't been my experience: you hire a bunch of domain experts to solve the various [hardware, controls, perception, imaging, systems] problems, but once you use ROS as your middleware you end up needing a bunch of ROS experts instead. This is due to the horrible build system, odd choice of defaults, instability under constrained resources, and how it inserts itself into everything. You end up needing more fine-grained control than ROS gives you to make an actually robust system, but by the time you discover this you'll be so invested into ROS that switching away will involve a full rewrite.
The same goes for further downstream: OpenCV images are basically a void* with a bunch of helper functions. (4.x tried to help with this but got sideswiped by DNN before anything concrete could happen.)
I guess it's the same rant the FreeBSD people have about the Linux ecosystem and its reliability. However I'd hope we raise our standards when it comes to mobile robotics that have the potential to accidentally seriously hurt people. And who knows, maybe one day OpenCV and ROS will pleasantly surprise me the way Linux has with its progress.
Re: Five Learnings from 15 Years in Perception
#7It's a fine balance between Not Invented Here syndrome vs. trying to hammer the square peg of off-the-shelf OSS into the round hole of the actual problem you're trying to solve. For example they suggest ROS as a robust industry-ready software, which absolutely hasn't been my experience: you hire a bunch of domain experts to solve the various [hardware, controls, perception, imaging, systems] problems, but once you us…
>This is due to the horrible build system, odd choice of defaults, instability under constrained resources, and how it inserts itself into everything. You end up needing more fine-grained control than ROS gives you to make an actually robust system, but by the time you discover this you'll be so invested into ROS that switching away will involve a full rewrite.
So true. The worst is that at many companies they will write a ROS clone in the end that does what they need, instead of getting rid of this awful programming paradigm altogether.
Re: Five Learnings from 15 Years in Perception
#8This article struck a personal note with me because around the same time (2008-2012) I was really getting into vision, and even got published as an undergrad for imaging sensor fusion work (...my first, only, and likely last only meaningful contribution to my species); while the wider MV/CV community was making incremental gains every few years (anyone else remember Histogram-of-Oriented-Gradients?), that's what they…
>> computer-vision, as a field, is (an) artificial-intelligence
A lot of our visual perception happens on the retina and in the 'processing pipeline' before reaching the brain.
Margaret Livingstone provides an excellent overview in her book "Vision and Art" and she takes a view similar to yours.
Re: Five Learnings from 15 Years in Perception
#9Why is it that people working on spy tech never have an ethics section in there "what I've learnt" rumblings?
In a world of total surveillance, the difference between a police state and free society is who has access to the data and what laws are enforced preventing them abusing it. The benefits of all this spy tech are great - if we manage it right. I mean telephone tapping is an example
A valid ethical question is: will this technology do more good than bad? Or put differently: given the bad implications this technology will likely have, is it worth it?
Example: "I have made this technology that makes me (and only me) earn 1 cent per day when managed right. Bad actors can use it to hack into hospitals and ransom them".
Wouldn't you agree that this hypothetical technology is probably not worth it?
In my opinion, it's not acceptable to say "I created a technology that helps bad guys be even worse, but I don't have any responsibility at all because I don't personally ask them to be bad guys".
Of course sometimes it's harder than one may think a posteriori: sometimes it was not clear while developping the technology that it would have bad applications.
Re: Five Learnings from 15 Years in Perception
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a world of total surveillance, the difference between a police state and free society is who has access to the data and what laws are enforced preventing them abusing it. The benefits of all this spy tech are great - if we manage it right. I mean telephone tapping is an example
A valid ethical question is: will this technology do more good than bad? Or put differently: given the bad implications this technology will likely have, is it worth it? Example: "I have made this technology that makes me (and only me) earn 1 cent per day when managed right. Bad actors can use it to hack into hospitals and ransom them". Wouldn't you agree that this hypothetical technology is probably not worth it? In…
The problem are incentives. There are monetary incentives to create whatever technology you can, because you can, and thats the way you earn money. There is zero incentive to consider how your technology might be abused.