How to train your dragon?

toothless

No! this post is not about the dragon from the animated movie (although it's one of my favourite). However this picture explains almost everything there is about the topic. For those of you who have seen this movie, computer vision machines can be thought to be like the dragon which can not fly. You have to train it about every single incident and how it should react to each one of them in order to fly.

Yup! that's right, this post is about training. Training a computer!

GSVI v2.0 real-time

After having finished the prototype guidance system earlier, an idea struck into my mind to make it real-time. Since everything was implemented in matlab (for the prototype) and because matlab is not good for real-time systems, I had to implement everything again (well sort of) in C++. I love working with OpenCV so there I began, doing all the stuff again in C++ using OpenCV library.

After much work, and tunning it with different algo's, i finally had it up and running. However, now came the main problem of testing this system in a real envoirnment, and since I have implmented everything on my desktop, it was impossible to take the desktop in a real path. So I took my camera and shot a small clip simulating a blind person walking, and deviading in both left and right directions slightly and then coming back to straight path.

I opened up this video using OpenCV and simply ran my code, the output was really impressive. This was the first time my system was working in a real world scenario, without controlled conditions.

Here is the output from the actual code:

The beginning

So that's where it all started. A few years back, when I was doing my bachelors degree, I started with my strong interests in robotics (not computer vision). Surprisingly, this field was very different from what I was actually studying at university level. I took up to the challenge and along with Telecommunication subjects, I was very keen at learning the basics of robotics. This was the first time I was building my very own robot, little did I know at that time that it was the very same robot which will lead me to a whole new different field of Computer Vision. A simple line follower named tracker was the turning point for my career.

Years later I did a Final Year Project titled "Guidance System for Visually Impaired using Digital Image Processing", which was basically a very complex line follower with no lines drawn at all. It used the natural surroundings and extracted 'useful lines' to compute the deviation and hence guiding a visually impaired person. Eventually I realized that my interests in the field of Computer Vision was way more than what I was studying.