In a distant security office, an alarm sounds and in seconds security officers on the casino floor have apprehended the suspect and escorted him out - before he laid a hand on a purse. Computer Vision has grown from a research area to a source of powerful tools for industry and other disciplines. The Department of Defense is especially concerned about protecting U.S. embassies and other vulnerable fixed site targets.
Computer vision has the potential for a wide variety of applications beyond security.
We want to track people and possibly the object they are carrying from room to room. This could be used in an airport or to monitor a child at school via a web site, for example, he explains. In forensics, computer vision is now used to identify a single fingerprint from a database of millions, but research will greatly improve the accuracy and efficiency of current systems. In manufacturing, computer vision is already used under controlled lighting conditions to inspect machine parts, but research into object identification is under way by Bebis to enable a computer to recognize an object in any lighting and from various angles. Ben Carlson, a Nevada graduate student, who recently received an honorable mention by the Computing Research Association during the 2000 Undergraduate Research National Competition, is working on using computer vision and neural networks to classify radio galaxies.