Lecture on Vision November 2005

Lecture to first year students 2nd Nov 2005

Evolvable, Biologically Plausible Visual Architectures
Aaron Sloman

The slides used for my lecture on vision can be found here as promised: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/talks/#talk8
They are available in several formats including postscript, PDF and two-up PDF (two slides per page, for less wasteful printing)
(The slides were written using Latex).
There are more slides than I presented in the lecture.

My talks website has many other slide presentations that you are welcome to use.

The Birmingham Cognition and Affect website has many papers and PhD theses on it.

There is a robotics project called 'CoSy', funded by the European Community which involves 7 Universities in different places, and which I hope will address some of the issues mentioned in my talk. The Birmingham website for CoSy is http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cosy/ Take a look at this partial specification of the tasks in designing the robot called 'PlayMate'.

Exercise

Try to make a list of the the different purposes for which humans use vision.
Try to find out how many of those uses can now be demonstrated in artificial vision systems, by searching the internet, reading books on vision, etc.

Online programs, tutorials and help files on vision in Pop11

There is a very useful collection of online teaching materials and image processing utilities called 'Popvision', written in a mixture of Pop11 and C (with some Fortran) developed by David Young at Sussex University.

The popvision library is available as part of Poplog. In addition to tutorial materials and tools on image analysis it includes some nice tools for displaying and manipulating images in Pop11. To find out what is in the package you first need to make it available.
In Pop11 do

    uses popvision

Then in the editor, VED, or XVED, try these commands. There are many example bits of code that you can run from the editor.

    HELP POPVISION
    TEACH RC_ARRAY

Other teach files available

    VISION1 - image representation and display
    VISION2 - introduction to convolution
    VISION3 - further convolution, Gaussian masks and edge detection
    VISION4 - the Hough transform
    VISION5 - perspective projection and stereoscopic vision
    VISION6 - visual motion
    VISION7 - active contours

The package also includes a matlab-like library for linear algebra.

A very useful overview of recent work on active vision

Tutorial on active vision (9.8MB PDF file), presented by Henrik Christensen at the Third Summerschool on Cognitive Vision Bonn, Germany August 2005

An excellent textbook on vision

D. Ballard and C. Brown, Computer Vision. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1982.
This is now available online here also available on our linux/unix system here

Taking notes in lectures

Please remember: if you sit passively listening in lectures you will not remember anything later: you need to be active in some way, e.g. taking rough notes on the content of the lecture, and then later that day or the next day, take your notes and re-write them in a more coherent form. After that you can throw them away: the point is not to have the notes in the end, but to engage with the notes by doing something active. That's how you will learn -- and stretch your minds, which is presumably what you came to University to do.

If you think I should provide any more information on this web page, please let me know.

Aaron (A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk)

Frames-free web site
Last updated: 3 Nov 2005