Complementing our vision system

It is interesting to note that among the five human senses (vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste), hearing is complemented with the ability to vocalize sounds as a mean of communication. That is, we have an ability to hear as well as generate the sounds to hear. We can use our vocal cords to sing, talk, and generate sound that can be heard. In contrast, while we have the ability to see, we are not able to generate electromagnetic waves within the visible range. That is, we do not have any means to generate light in an analogous way to our vocal cords. Aside…I would not count radiation in terms of heat since it is not visible to our eyes.

Does this mean that our concept of vision is somehow biased? Are we naturally inclined to structure our research based on how our visual system is built? I hope not.

On the technological side, researchers are finding other means to complement the vision system by supplying a light source. For example, pulsed light and other similar light sources have been used in machine vision as a means to facilitate feature detection. I am encouraged by the fact that there is a growing research community that is studying other types of visual systems. For example, there are conferences around biologically inspired animal vision system that may shed light (pardon the pun) on different theory and methods pattern recognition. There are also workshops centered around vision in the non-visible spectrum.

Referring again to our five senses, there is a news article describing an application where a laser finder is coupled with a haptic system to enable us to touch an object from a distance. I’m certain that we could, as researchers, find other interesting applications using technology that complements our vision system. We should not be biased with our current concept of our own visual system when we explore new application areas in computer vision.

Continued in the next post about seeing things as they are …