Opinion

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Here Come the Learning Machines

In many applications of digital signal processing – such as speech recognition and computer vision – the essential objective is to distinguish objects of interest, such as words or faces. This can be very challenging in real-world situations where objects of interest are distorted (e.g., a person is speaking with an accent, or a face is turned at an angle from the camera) or obscured (for example, a voice is competing with background noise, or a face is partially covered by a hand). Over the Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—"Where Am I?"

If you frequently travel across many time zones, you've probably had the unsettling experience of waking at an odd hour and being uncertain about where exactly you are. If you're like me, your instinctive solution to this confusion is to turn on a light and look around. Instantly, you recognize that you're in a hotel room. A few more visual clues (sometimes requiring a peek through the window) and suddenly you know where you are. And although it's largely a subconscious process, looking around Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Consumer Electronics Begin to See

Longtime readers of this column will know that I've been predicting the proliferation of visual intelligence in a wide range of products – including consumer electronics – for a few years now. Over that time, there have been a few high-profile successes of vision in consumer electronics. For example, the first-generation Microsoft Kinect, while not a hit with serious gamers, sold tens of million units and enabled many casual users to enjoy console gaming for the first time. There have also been Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Garbage In, Garbage Out

The phrase "garbage in, garbage out" is usually associated with writing and using computer programs. In fact, the concept originated with Charles Babbage, inventor of the first computer. Amusingly, Babbage wrote: On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?'...I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. The concept of "garbage in, garbage out" applies Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—"We're Number One!"

My colleagues and I at BDTI recently completed a project to help a chip company select a licensable processor core to perform computer vision functions in a new SoC design. In the process, we learned many things about these processors. But, more interesting to me, we also learned something about human nature. A typical general-purpose embedded processor chip is used by hundreds or thousands of customers, so suppliers find it necessary to make detailed information about these chips readily Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Is That a Computer in Your Camera?

One of the things I find endlessly fascinating about digital signal processing is that it enables using computation to offset physical limitations. For example, with the right signal processing, you can get awesome sound out of tiny, inexpensive loudspeakers, like those that fit into a smartphone or tablet. It turns out that this also applies to photography. Virtually all digital cameras today do some algorithmic processing to improve the quality of captured images. And the amount and Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Is Your Brain Big Enough?

Do you ever feel like you could use a bigger brain? One of my all-time favorite Dilbert cartoons is the 1994 strip depicting a consultant so smart he had to "wrap his brain around his torso." In contrast, I often feel as if my brain could benefit from an external accelerator. As an engineer, I've often wondered when humans will be able to boost our brainpower with electronic devices. One could argue that we already do augment our brains via electronics. Through smartphones, an amazing amount of Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Quietly, Our Cars Are Learning to Drive Themselves

Lately there's been a great deal of buzz about self-driving cars. The idea of autonomous vehicles evokes excitement in some people and terror in others. Clearly, there are significant challenges to be overcome before self-driving cars can become mainstream. To me, the most exciting aspect of self-driving cars is that many of the same technologies required for future self-driving cars are making human-driven cars safer today. Take Mobileye, for example. The Israeli company has been a pioneer in Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—What’s the Best Processor for Embedded Vision?

These days, more and more product creators are incorporating computer vision into their designs. At the recent Embedded Vision Summit conference, a majority of the roughly 500 attendees reported that they are currently working on a vision-enabled product, or plan to start a vision-based design within the next year. And, increasingly, these designs target high-volume markets, like the recently announced Amazon Fire smartphone and the collision-prevention systems now being offered in many mid- Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Creating Machines That See: Show or Tell?

In 2011, I spoke with Professor Jitendra Malik, a distinguished computer vision researcher and teacher at U.C. Berkeley. Professor Malik, tongue-in-cheek, remarked that he is frequently frustrated when trying to explain his work to non-technical people. In their minds, his research often sounds like an awful lot of effort just to enable a computer to approach the object-recognition capabilities of a toddler. Indeed, this is one of the paradoxes of computer vision. In some cases, vision systems Read more...