Listening to different aspects of ‘Computer Vision in Developing Countries’ at the workshop with this name was exciting. Clearly time has come to apply visual computing techniques to many industrial problems in developing countries. But more important is to develop some disruptive innovative approaches to solve problems in this space. Mobile phones equipped with cameras and microphones are the driver of next generation of such computing. I always believed that this will open up many innovative uses of this new generation computing (based on mobile phones, vision, and audio) that will take computing to the next Billion much faster and in more relevant ways. After listening to talks at this workshop, it became clear to me that this is starting to happen and NOW is the right time to do this.
My own talk resulted in good questions and discussion. I have included my presentation here. Your comments and reactions will be most appreciated.
I think you’re right on point here. Vision extends beyond the boundaries of language, literacy, and most interpretation. With social networking becoming a forefront mode of connection and with the extreme popularity of mobile cameras, it seems that the next logical step is to develop applications and technologies that utilize both vision and networking to create a common thread of communication globally. We have the networking knowledge, the fast mobile net, and the cameras; all the technology is right here, so if there’s any time to develop, it’s now.
Yes you are absolutely right, Computer vision in developing regions has been experiencing fast growth, especially in the automotive, pharmaceutical, packaging, and electronic industries. Although high quality research is carried out in many educational institutions and industry laboratories in developing regions, the visibility of these efforts within the international community is rather low. The projects going on in developing regions, however, can bring new perspectives to the international research community, because the constraints and conditions of research projects on developing regions are frequently different from what researchers in developed regions typically encounter. On the other side, computer vision has many applications in developing regions that can have an important impact on development, e.g. manufacturing, education, medicine, natural interaction with computers, and many others.