A while back I wrote about Computer Vision with a short description of what it is and what we can do with it, today I decided to create a list of what we can do with it, either using only Computer Vision techniques or in conjunction with other technologies.

1. Augmented reality/Virtual Reality: Track a person with cameras and place him in a different context on the screen. This is used for creating movies, helping the animation by tracking a persons movements.
2. Eye-tracking: This can be used for people who can’t move their fingers, to write with their eyes instead of with the hands. Another common use for eye-tracking is Usability testing of websites, where users are left alone with the screen and a camera to track the eye movements, where after a heatmap is created depending on those movements.
3. Tracking and movement sensing: People, vehicles, animals etc - anything can be tracked. This can be used in shops for the owner to see which parts are most popular, or to find movement where there should be none - i.e. from an intruder or similar. This can also be used to track point in a video and insert objects such as 3D models on top.
4. Creating panoramas: Instead of a user having to define a number of points you can let the system suggest correspondences between images.
5. 3D Reconstruction: Reconstructing buildings in 3D can be useful to a historian who wants to show how an environment once looked, or to an architect who wants to create a building. The artist can change current landscapes, the gamer can see a real landscape and the traveler can be helped to decide where to go.
6. Commercial: Show ads in stadiums on TV depending on the audience - we can easily show an ad for Carlsberg on Danish TV on Old Trafford Stadium where in reality the ad is for Guinness.
7. Sports: Balls, pucks, players and everything else in the modern games can be tracked with cameras, giving statistic to help for example managers with the coaching or golf players improve their game. This type of tracking was first used in rocket science, now it’s explored at universities with normal off-the-shelf webcams and cheap digital cameras.

There are of course many more applications to Computer Vision, but as you can see there is everyday use of it which seamlessly integrate with our everyday passtime. I could also touch on for example robotics, but will wait with that for another time…

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