Comments on: A Menagerie of CV Markers

By: greg

greg — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 23:23:26 +0000

Blaine -- But "pondering" is only the human way of digesting bits of images and the world. And it's not even the chief one of those. Most of our looking faculties are actually doing all kinds of other low-levels things that we only have the vaguest notion of. Not pondering. The point of this isn't to project a human subjectivity onto the machines, to imagine them "pondering" in the same way we do. The point is that something is going on inside there. Computation. These computer vision systems exist just as much as people do, even if in a very different way. I'm not positing any kind of equivalence between the two, much the opposite. I'm advocating for a process of speculatively imagining the quite different way that these systems see and compute. By necessity this process of speculation will involve quite serious and focused attention on understanding the details of the algorithms and techniques involved. That's why I started Makematics which is specifically aimed at doing just that. However just because we're not going to fall into the pathetic fallacy of personifying these systems that also doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to imagine them at all. And analyzing the algorithms from a purely functional point of view is inadequate, by itself, to this task. We have to engage some of our other imaginative faculties as well. This is something I tried to get at with my Machine Pareidolia project. The breakdown in that post of the three different types of faces FaceTracker detected (agreement, near agreement, and totally other) is an attempt to imagine the algorithm's point of view which somewhat overlaps with humans but also diverges significantly.

By: Blaine Cook

Blaine Cook — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 08:35:28 +0000

To Tom's original point, work like DTAM that uses everything in the image as machine-readable markers, and Astrometry that uses the stars themselves as machine-readable markers both prove your point, I think. Once you start going down that path, there are very many examples: DNA sequencing, just about anything done with 'R', Google, and so on. My major point of departure with NA is that the fact that machines have been instructed to recognise features which we imbue with meaning does not mean that the machines themselves read meaning into those features. Just because some primitive algorithms use assistive technologies that we can see and ponder does not mean that those algorithms also ponder, any more than their more advanced cousins.

By: method

method — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 07:29:49 +0000

One that a lot of people have interacted with is the Kinect calibration card: http://kinect.dashhacks.com/kinect-calibration-card