A Possible Reason for why Data-Driven Beats Theory-Driven Computer Vision

Why do some continue to wonder about the success and dominance of deep learning methods in computer vision and AI? Is it not enough that these methods provide practical solutions to many problems? Well no, it is not enough, at least for those who feel there should be a science that underpins all of this and that we should have a clear understanding of how this success was achieved. Here, this paper proposes that the dominance we are witnessing would not have been possible by the methods of deep learning alone: the tacit change has been the evolution of empirical practice in computer vision and AI over the past decades. We demonstrate this by examining the distribution of sensor settings in vision datasets and performance of both classic and deep learning algorithms under various camera settings. This reveals a strong mismatch between optimal performance ranges of classical theory-driven algorithms and sensor setting distributions in the common vision datasets, while data-driven models were trained for those datasets. The head-to-head comparisons between data-driven and theory-driven models were therefore unknowingly biased against the theory-driven models.

Active Control of Camera Parameters for Object Detection Algorithms

Camera parameters not only play an important role in determining the visual quality of perceived images, but also affect the performance of vision algorithms, for a vision-guided robot. By quantitatively evaluating four object detection algorithms, with respect to varying ambient illumination, shutter speed and voltage gain, it is observed that the performance of the algorithms is highly dependent on these variables. From this observation, a novel active control of camera parameters method is proposed, to make robot vision more robust under different light conditions. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, which improves the performance of object detection algorithms, compared with the conventional auto-exposure algorithm.