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By the Power of Grayscale

If you enjoyed this post you may also like the 2024 book foundations of computer vision: https://visionbook.mit.edu/

prior hn thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44281506

i don't have any background in computer vision but enjoyed how the introductory chapter gets right into it illustrating how to build a limited but working simple vision system

by shoo1762303146
It may come as a surprise to some that a lot of industrial computer vision is done in grayscale. In a lot of industrial CV tasks, the only things that matter are cost, speed, and dynamic range. Every approach we have to making color images compromises on one of those three characteristics.

I think this kind of thing might have real, practical use cases in industry if it's fast enough.

by ryukoposting1762302190
About 15, 20 years ago I was still in uni and we had a computer vision lab, the main guy there had been working on that subject for years and dealt with businesses where his stuff was used for quality control.

Without fail, step one of computer vision was to bring the image down to grayscale and / or filter for specific colours so you ended up with a 1 bit representation.

My "algorithm" for a robot that was to follow a line drawn on the floor boiled down to "filter out the colour green, then look at the bottom rows of the image and find the black pixels. If they're to the left, adjust to the left, if to the right adjust to the right". Roughly. I'm sure it could be done a lot more cleverly but I was pretty proud of it AND the whole tool suite was custom made, from editing environment to programming language. Expensive cameras and robot, too.

by Cthulhu_1762351012
Appreciate the old school non-AI approach.
by teiferer1762291328
I was working on a image editor on the browser, https://victorribeiro.com/customFilter

Right now the neat future it have is the ability of running custom filters of varied window size of images, and use custom formulas to blend several images

I don't have a tutorial at hand on how to use it, but I have a YouTube video where I show some of its features

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3pnEx5_eGm9rVr1_u1Hm_LK6...

by atum471762288785
Really enjoyed this article, thanks for sharing!

I had recently learned about using image pyramids[1] in conjunction with template matching algorithms like SAD to do simple and efficient object recognition, it was quite fun.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_%28image_processing%29

by grep_it1762297344
I’m not a “C” person but I’ve really enjoyed reading this, it’s quite approachable and well written. Thank you for writing it.
by rmonvfer1762299147
This is really solid intro to computer vision, bravo!
by swiftcoder1762341681
Referencing "By the power of Grayskull!"
by kazinator1762291827
From a 70s kid to an 80s kid, well done!
by nakamoto_damacy1762289599
The blob-finding algorithm makes me think of the "advent of code" problems - I wouldn't have thought to do a two-pass approach, but now that I see it set out in front of me it's obviously a great idea. Seems like this technique could quite easily be generalised to work with a range of problems.
by jsmailes1762351967
For those who don't know, the author is a very prolific dev:

https://github.com/zserge?tab=repositories&q=&type=&language...

by hu31762305357
This was a fantastic post. I've never really thought much about image processing, and this was a great introduction.
by sethammons1762338822
Didn't recognize George Smiley in those photos. Which makes sense, given he's an espiocrat.
by ggm1762298095
Quality He-Man reference.
by ranger_danger1762287676
So, who is He-Man, and who is Skelator?
by wutangson11762467326
This title is excellent.
by nusl1762353978