Ask HN: What are some practical applications of computer vision? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are some practical applications of computer vision?

3 pointsanujkk4 comments

Is there any particular problem you know that can be solved through computer vision? Some existing applications include object recognition(face/cat recognition), hand gesture recognition(flipping page of book with hand movements), object tracking (Did anyone parked his car in No Parking Zone?), etc.

Basically, I am looking for some practical/meaningful project ideas to practice computer vision using python. I will be using OpenCV/SimpleCV for this purpose.

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I once listened to a lecture by a guy at the ACPFG (Australian Centre for plant functional genomics) who was working on computer vision -

the problem is to evaluate a large amount of pictures of plants to gather information about each individual, i.e., how large the leaves are, how green (or healthy) the plant is, how large the plant in itself is etc.

I don't think they got that far, as they are still (AFAIK) evaluating their experimental plants by "eye". Might be something for you!

They've been looking for people in the past: http://www.tafejobs.com.au/show.php?title=research_associate...

There are tons of applications for what is called "machine vision" in manufacturing. Typically these involve measuring, counting, looking for differences.

A good example of a hardware/software vendor in this domain is Cognex. Look at their website for ideas of common problems that are solved with machine vision: http://www.cognex.com/machine-vision-applications.aspx

stb-tester[1] captures video from a set-top box or smart tv or similar appliance, and runs automated tests against it by sending infrared signals and analysing the captured video. It uses python and OpenCV. It is open-source software (LGPL).

Currently stb-tester's image processing is very simple: It looks for specific, previously-captured images, accounting for some noise. But there is plenty of scope for much smarter processing: Identifying areas with text within the image, then doing OCR; or measuring some aspect of image or video quality.

[1] http://stb-tester.com

If you want a product that I would use, an open-source OCR reader that took an image of text and then outputted the formatted text in a plain readable file would be awesome.

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