1 The Challenge of Vision – Foundations of Computer Vision

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Let’s start with a simple observation: every day, when you wake up, you open your eyes and see. You see without any effort; you do not get tired after a few hours from seeing too much. The same happens with all the other senses. With them you perceive the world around you: you hear the birds or the car noises, you smell the breakfast and feel the touch of the sheets, and that keeps going on and on until the end of the day. But the most surprising fact is that your brain is continuously solving very complex tasks still unmatched by any artificial system. The apparent simplicity of perceiving the world around us produces the false intuition that it will be easy to build a machine capable of seeing as humans do. Let’s ignore the senses of hearing, touch, taste, and smell, and let’s focus on the visual sense. Human vision is capable of extracting information about the world around us using only the light that reflects off surfaces in the direction of our eyes. The light that reaches our ey

1 The Challenge of Vision – Foundations of Computer Vision 1.1 Introduction Let’s start with a simple observation: every day, when you wake up, you open your eyes and see. You see without any effort; you do not get tired after a few hours from seeing too much. The same happens with all the other senses. With them you perceive the world around you: you hear the birds or the car noises, you smell the breakfast and feel the touch of the sheets, and that keeps going on and on until the end of the day. But the most surprising fact is that your brain is continuously solving very complex tasks still

1 The Challenge of Vision – Foundations of Computer Vision

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