36,509 research outputs found
The Profiling Potential of Computer Vision and the Challenge of Computational Empiricism
Computer vision and other biometrics data science applications have commenced
a new project of profiling people. Rather than using 'transaction generated
information', these systems measure the 'real world' and produce an assessment
of the 'world state' - in this case an assessment of some individual trait.
Instead of using proxies or scores to evaluate people, they increasingly deploy
a logic of revealing the truth about reality and the people within it. While
these profiling knowledge claims are sometimes tentative, they increasingly
suggest that only through computation can these excesses of reality be captured
and understood. This article explores the bases of those claims in the systems
of measurement, representation, and classification deployed in computer vision.
It asks if there is something new in this type of knowledge claim, sketches an
account of a new form of computational empiricism being operationalised, and
questions what kind of human subject is being constructed by these
technological systems and practices. Finally, the article explores legal
mechanisms for contesting the emergence of computational empiricism as the
dominant knowledge platform for understanding the world and the people within
it
Recognizing Objects In-the-wild: Where Do We Stand?
The ability to recognize objects is an essential skill for a robotic system
acting in human-populated environments. Despite decades of effort from the
robotic and vision research communities, robots are still missing good visual
perceptual systems, preventing the use of autonomous agents for real-world
applications. The progress is slowed down by the lack of a testbed able to
accurately represent the world perceived by the robot in-the-wild. In order to
fill this gap, we introduce a large-scale, multi-view object dataset collected
with an RGB-D camera mounted on a mobile robot. The dataset embeds the
challenges faced by a robot in a real-life application and provides a useful
tool for validating object recognition algorithms. Besides describing the
characteristics of the dataset, the paper evaluates the performance of a
collection of well-established deep convolutional networks on the new dataset
and analyzes the transferability of deep representations from Web images to
robotic data. Despite the promising results obtained with such representations,
the experiments demonstrate that object classification with real-life robotic
data is far from being solved. Finally, we provide a comparative study to
analyze and highlight the open challenges in robot vision, explaining the
discrepancies in the performance
Finite Boolean Algebras for Solid Geometry using Julia's Sparse Arrays
The goal of this paper is to introduce a new method in computer-aided
geometry of solid modeling. We put forth a novel algebraic technique to
evaluate any variadic expression between polyhedral d-solids (d = 2, 3) with
regularized operators of union, intersection, and difference, i.e., any CSG
tree. The result is obtained in three steps: first, by computing an independent
set of generators for the d-space partition induced by the input; then, by
reducing the solid expression to an equivalent logical formula between Boolean
terms made by zeros and ones; and, finally, by evaluating this expression using
bitwise operators. This method is implemented in Julia using sparse arrays. The
computational evaluation of every possible solid expression, usually denoted as
CSG (Constructive Solid Geometry), is reduced to an equivalent logical
expression of a finite set algebra over the cells of a space partition, and
solved by native bitwise operators.Comment: revised version submitted to Computer-Aided Geometric Desig
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