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The challenge of general machine vision

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Abstract

I argue that in spite of the progress in several machine vision applications, the general machine vision problem is not going to be solved any time soon. There are three reasons for that: (1) The complexity of human vision: Bottom-up and top-down processes are tightly interwoven, and we have no good models for dealing with that; (2) The fact that perceptual similarity is not the same as mathematical similarity; (3) The illusion of progress by relying on “proofs by example” that are not always valid. I discuss several examples of applications that were successful because they did not face any of the three obstacles.

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Acknowledgments

While writing this paper, I received significant help from several people who commented on drafts of the paper and/or provided pointers to literature and research activities that I had missed. They are (in alphabetical order): Henry Baird (Lehigh Univ.), Alex Berg (Stony Brook Univ.), Kevin Bowyer (Notre Dame), Enis Cetin (Bilkent Univ., Ankara), Jelena Kovacevic (Carnegie Mellon Univ.), Mike McCann (Carnegie Mellon Univ.), Imad Malhas (IrisGuard), Paul Pavlidis (Univ. of British Columbia), Fabio Roli (Univ. of Cagliari, Italy), Dimitri Samaras (Stony Brook Univ.), Ray Smith (Google), John Tsotsos (York Univ., Canada) and Greg Zelinsky (Stony Brook Univ.). Obviously, these people need not share all of my views on machine vision.

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  1. Computer Science Department, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY , 11794, USA

    Theo Pavlidis

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  1. Theo Pavlidis
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Correspondence to Theo Pavlidis.

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Pavlidis, T. The challenge of general machine vision. SIViP 8, 191–195 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-013-0549-8

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