COMPUTER

VISION

LECTURE 01
 OUTLINE
• Vision, Visual System
• Color Vision, Computer Vision
• Image Processing Steps
• Applications
 WHAT IS COMPUTER VISION
• Humans use their eyes and their brains to see and visually
sense the world around them.
• Computer vision is the science that aims to give a similar, if not
better, capability to a machine or computer.
• Computer vision is concerned with the automatic extraction,
analysis and understanding of useful information from a single
image or a sequence of images.
• It involves the development of a theoretical and algorithmic
basis to achieve automatic visual understanding.
 VISION
• Vision : state of being able to see
• Vision is the process of discovering,
• What is present in the world
• and
• where it is.

• Perception: process of becoming aware of something through

senses
• perception is the process of acquiring, interring, selecting,
and organizing sensory information.
 VISUAL SYSTEM
• The visual system allows to assimilate the information from the
environment.
• The act of seeing starts when the lens of the EYE focus an
image of the outside world onto a light-sensitive membrane in
the back of the eye, called the Retina.
• The retina is actually part of the brain that is isolated to serve
as a transducer for the conversion of patters of light into neural
signals.
Visual = of vision
System: set of connectors/parts/nodes forming as a whole
Retina: Layer at back of eyeball, it has calls and is sensitive to
light, it triggers neurons impulses to brain
 HUMAN VISUAL SYSTEM
• The human visual system consists mainly of:
1. Eye (image sensor or camera)
2. Optic nerve (transmission path),
3. Brain (image information processing unit or computer).
• It is one of the most sophisticated image processing and
analysis systems.
• Its understanding would also help in the design of efficient,
accurate and effective computer/machine vision systems.
VISUAL SYSTEM
 CROSS-SECTION OF THE
HUMAN EYE
• Nearly spherical with a diameter of 20 mm (approx.).
• Cornea --- Outer tough transparent membrane, covers anterior
surface.
• Sclera --- Outer tough opaque membrane, covers rest of the optic
globe.
• Choroid --- Contains blood vessels, provides nutrition.
• Iris --- Anterior portion of choroid, pigmented, gives color to the
eye.
• Pupil --- Central opening of the Iris, controls the amount of light
entering the eye (diameter varies from 2-8 mm).
• Lens --- Made of concentric layers of fibrous cells, contains 60-
70% water.
• Retina --- Innermost layer, “screen” on which image is formed by
the lens when properly focused, contains photoreceptors (cells
sensitive to light).
 VISUAL SYSTEM
• The human eye achieves proper focus of the object by
changing the shape of the lens - changing tis focal-focal
length.
• The lens gets flattened (thinned) to focus the distant objects,
and gets thickened to focus the near the objects.
• The focal length of the lens varies between 14 mm and 17 mm.
• The distance between the lens and the retina along the visual
axis is around 17 mm.
• An inverted image of the object is formed on the fovea region
of the retina.
VISUAL SYSTEM
 PIN HOLE CAMERA
• A simplest imaging device which can map a 3-D scene onto a
2-D image plane.
• The projection from 3-D to 2-D is a perspective projection.
• A pinhole camera forms a inverted image of the object, so does
the Human Eye.
 COLOR VISION
Color vision is the capacity of an organism or machine to
distinguish object based on the wavelengths (or frequencies) of
the light they reflect or emit.
The nervous system derives color by comparing the responses to
light from the several types of cone photoreceptors in the eye.

For humans, the visible spectrum ranges approximately from 380

to 750 nm.
 COLOR VISION
• A red apple does not emit ‘red’ light. Rather, it simply absorbs
all the frequencies of visible light shining on it except for a
group of frequencies that is perceived as red, which are
reflected.
• An apple is perceived to be red, only, because the human Eye
can distinguish between different wavelengths.
• Three things are needed to see color:
• A light source,
• A detector (e.g. the Eye)
• A sample to view
 COMPUTER VISION
• Computer vision is the science and technology of machines
that can see.
• Computer vision is the study of analysis of pictures and videos
in order to achieve results similar to those by human.
 COMPUTER VISION
• Since perception can be seen as the extraction of information
from sensory signals.
• Computer vision can be seen as the scientific investigation of
artificial systems for perception from images or multi-
dimensional data.
• Computer vision can also be described as a complement of
Biological Vision as computer vision, studies and describes
artificial vision system that are implemented in software and/or
hardware.
 RELATED DISCIPLINES
• Image Processing
• Computer Graphics
• Pattern Recognition
• Artificial Intelligence
• Applied Mathematics
• Learning
Image Processing
Title says that it processes image, means does some
transformations on image. That means may be it does some
smoothing, sharpening, contrasting, stretching.. on the image for
making image more enhancive & readable that is input and output
of a process are images.
Computer Vision
The ultimate goal is to use computers to emulate human vision,
including learning and being able to make inferences and take
actions based on visual inputs.
RELATED DISCIPLINES
FIELDS OF AN IMAGE
 IMAGE SOURCES
• Images can categorized according to their source (e.g., Visual,
X-ray, etc)
• Principle energy sources for images
• Electromagnetic energy spectrum
• Acoustic, ultrasonic
• Electronic (in the form of electron beams used in electron
microscopy)
• Synthetic images, used for modeling and visualization, are
generated by computer
 LIGHT TYPES
• Achromatic light
• Light that voids color is called achromatic or
monochromatic light
• The only attribute of such light is its intensity, or amount
• The term gray level generally is used to describe
monochromatic intensity because it ranges from black to
grays, and finally to white.

• Chromatic light
• Chromatic light spans the electromagnetic energy
spectrum from approximately 0.43 to 0.79 .m
 CHROMATIC LIGHT
Three basic quantities are used to describe the qulity of a
chromatic light source:
1. Radiance
2. Luminance
3. Brightness
Radiance: The total amount of energy that flows from the light
source, and it is usually measured in watts (W)
Luminance: Measured in lumens (lm), gives a measure of the
amount of energy an observer perceives from a light source.
Brightness: brightness is a subjective descriptor of light
perception that practically impossible to measure.
One of the key factors in describing color sensation.
 EXAMPLE
Light emitted from a source operating in the far infrared region of
the spectrum could have significant energy (radiance), but an
observer would hardly perceive it; its luminance would be almost
zero.
 ELECTROMAGNETIC
SPECTRUM
Electromagnetic spectrum: Band of radiations
Radiation: energy that travels and spreads out as it goes.
Light: light is the electromagnetic radiation within a certain portion of
the electromagnetic spectrum.

The electromagnet spectrum arranged according to energy per

photon.
Plank’s constant, or h i.e., h=6.626X10-34 JXS