Right now the neat future it have is the ability of running custom filters of varied window size of images, and use custom formulas to blend several images
I don't have a tutorial at hand on how to use it, but I have a YouTube video where I show some of its features
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3pnEx5_eGm9rVr1_u1Hm_LK6...
Here's the source code if anyone's interested https://github.com/victorqribeiro/customFilter
There’s a reason deep learning took over computer vision.
However, if I can’t understand the system, how can I debug it if there are any issues? Part of an engineer's job is to understand the system they’re working with, and deep learning models often act as a "black box," which makes this difficult.
Debugging issues in these systems can be a major challenge. It often requires specialized tools like saliency maps or attention visualizations, analyzing training data for problems, and sometimes retraining the entire model. This process is not only time-consuming but also may not guarantee clear answers.
What good is being able to understand a system if this understanding doesn’t improve performance anyway?
But as engineers, it’s essential to understand and maintain the systems we build. If everything is a black box, how can we control it? Without understanding, we risk becoming dependent on systems we can’t troubleshoot or improve. Don’t you think it’s important for engineers to maintain control and not rely entirely on something they don’t fully understand?
That said, there are scenarios where using a black-box system is justifiable, such as in non-critical applications where performance outweighs the need for complete control. However, for critical applications, black-box systems may not be suitable due to the risks involved. Ultimately, what is "responsible" depends on the potential consequences of a system failure.
That said, I still prefer traditional thresholding in controlled environments because the algorithm is understandable and transparent.
Debugging issues in AI systems can be challenging due to their "black box" nature. If the AI fails, you might need to analyze the model, adjust training data, or retrain, a process that is neither simple nor guaranteed to succeed. Traditional methods, however, allow for more direct tuning and certainty in their behavior. For consistent, explainable results in controlled settings, they are often the better option.
Counter intuitively, I’ve often found that CNNs are worse at thresholding in many circumstances than a simple otsu or adaptive threshold. My usual technique is to use the least complex algorithm and work my way up the ladder only when needed.
One fun thing is that with a simple model it's not much slower than techniques like otsu (you're still doing a roughly constant amount of vectorized, fast math for each pixel), but you can grab an alpha channel for free even when working in colored spaces, allowing you to near-perfectly segment the background out from an image.
The UX is also dead-simple. If a human operator doesn't like the results, they just click around the image to refine the segmentation. They can then apply directly to a batch of images, or if each image might need some refinement then there are straightforward solutions for allowing most of the learned information to transfer from one image to the next, requiring much less operator input for the rest of the batch.
As an added plus, it also works well even for gridlines and other stranger backgrounds, still without needing any fancy algorithms.
In some places it works really well.
If you want to anything even moderately complex, deep learning is the only game in town.
And often the CNNs are so finicky about noise or distortion that you need something as an input stage to clean up the data.
Not AI, not even ML.
Until the rise of LLMs recently using human-designed deterministic algorithms to perform ‘intelligent’ tasks (like image processing, and especially image recognition) has absolutely been considered AI.
AI encompasses (encompassed?...) everything that uses computation to produce intelligence-like results.
I fear the terminology battle has been lost, though, and nowadays most people consider at least neural networks - perhaps also non-determinism of output - to be a prerequisite for something being “AI” - which is actually _less_ meaningful to the end-user.
It’s pretty hilarious and history-blind to claim that AI is just 2015+ era deep neural magic black boxes or something, as if the field wasn’t invented until then. As if neural networks themselves hadn’t been tried several times at that point and found okay for classification tasks but not much more.
As if for a long time, most AI researchers didn’t even want to talk about neural networks because they feared that their "cool" factor takes focus away from real AI research, and because the last time NNs were a big deal it was followed by one of the AI winters of broken promises and dwindling budgets.
I didn't make that claim. Was this written by a hallucinating LLM?
I had recently learned about using image pyramids[1] in conjunction with template matching algorithms like SAD to do simple and efficient object recognition, it was quite fun.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_%28image_processing%29
A truly clever image processing method.
I think this kind of thing might have real, practical use cases in industry if it's fast enough.
Which vision library are you using? I’m using Halcon by MVTec.
Color makes major compromises physically also, since it seems like the Red, Green and Blue channels are sampling from the same physical location but the actual sensor buckets are offset from each other.
prior hn thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44281506
i don't have any background in computer vision but enjoyed how the introductory chapter gets right into it illustrating how to build a limited but working simple vision system
https://github.com/zserge?tab=repositories&q=&type=&language...
Without fail, step one of computer vision was to bring the image down to grayscale and / or filter for specific colours so you ended up with a 1 bit representation.
My "algorithm" for a robot that was to follow a line drawn on the floor boiled down to "filter out the colour green, then look at the bottom rows of the image and find the black pixels. If they're to the left, adjust to the left, if to the right adjust to the right". Roughly. I'm sure it could be done a lot more cleverly but I was pretty proud of it AND the whole tool suite was custom made, from editing environment to programming language. Expensive cameras and robot, too.
ranger_danger•3mo ago