Computer Vision: 1957 - The first computer scanner copies a 2-inch photo of the inventor Russell A, Kirschs son. 1964 - Defense contractors Woody Bledsoe, Helen Chan Wolf, and Charles Bisson launch a facial-recognition system for an unnamed intelligence agency. 1976 - U.K. police invent a license-plate recognition system. The first major installation is in 1993, as a ring of steel around London to counteract IRA bombings. 1985 - The first autonomous land vehicle, made by Lockheed Martin, Carnegie Mellon, and others, uses video-based imaging to follow a road at three mph. 2004 - Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity land on the Red Planet using computer vision to calculate distance and position on descent. 2008 - The first 3-D pizza-sorting system, the Scorpion, builds a 3-D profile of 7,200 products per hour using multiple cameras. It automatically culls misshapen pies. 2010 - Microsoft Kinect is released; it can track 20 human features at 30 times per second. Shortly thereafter, a man hacks the device to track his own nipples for the first time. 2014 - Phone processors become fast enough to handle pattern recognition. Apps such as Vhoto pick worthy stills from a video based on action sequences and facial expressions.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 11:48:12 +0000