It is fascinating to see how AI is making innumerable changes in our society and the period post to the coming of fast GPU hardware which led to faster training of deep learning models gave a foundational force for AI discoveries. Alexnet, a deep neural network architecture which won the imagenet challenge on September, 2012, showed how GPUs can be leveraged to train a Image classifier, Image Classification is a complex task which involves classifying images into different categories and it involves understanding of complex background in the images. After Alexnet, many revolutionary architectures came in which tried solve computer vision problems in novel ways, like the yolo versions for object detection, Convolutional lstms for licensce plate recognition, document reading and handwritting recognition. Similarly many visual recognition models came up for solving queries involved in text based querying of images. In recent times Visual Transformers are creating a wide impact in terms of accuracy on bench mark datasets for many vision tasks.

This is more of a technical perspective of computer vision field but how do these advanced tools help in solving real world problems. There are innumerable number of application areas where these AI tools are helpful. Vision Applications can help us in reducing our work load in mission critical areas where constant surveillance is required. Self Driving Cars, Vision asssisted robots, Scene Analysis, Retail Analytics, Surveilance Application and Sports Analytics are some of the active areas where the vision applications are actively deployed and there are many unlisted applications. Below are the some of the discussed application areas:

Retail and E-Commerce:

In the retail sector, computer vision is used for applications like automated checkout, shelf monitoring, and customer behavior analysis. Customer behavior Analysis involves detection of people in retail area like heat-mapping location where people have visited, counting the active people who entered/left the store, the waiting time at checkout areas and the profile of the customers.

Logistics

Computer vision applications can help immensely in automated sorting and packaging of different goods to there recipient locations. It reduces the shipping time and cost, making it effective. Amazon and walmart have already deployed such solutions, there are still many pipeline parts where computer vision and automation can be helpful. Volume Analysis of packed good is one of the nascent application area.

Automated Surveillance and Security:

Computer vision is widely used in surveillance systems to monitor and analyze video feeds. It can detect unusual activities, identify potential security threats, and enhance overall safety and security. Europe has brought GDPR laws which establish set of rules to store identity of a person. Privacy is a important concern for many organisations, which sometimes are at logger heads with preserving or securing the areas. Anonymisation is one such application, where security personnel can observe peoples in the area but their identity is concealed. This enables the security agencies to monitor any unusual activity. Violence Detection, Weapon Detection and activity recognition are few of the security application. Vision based Alarms are also installed in many high security areas which requires active monitoring.

Quality Control and Inspection:

In manufacturing industries, computer vision systems can be employed to inspect products for defects and ensure quality control. This reduces the need for manual inspection and improves efficiency.

Document/Text/Signs Reading:

Licence plates, documents reading, hand writing recognition, sign board reading and automated parking are some of the important fields where CV is getting applied. Autonomous driving is one of the important product of this field. CV application in these field has changed so many things and revolutionized the landscape.

Health and Medicine:

X-Ray based diagnosis, Vision based surgery and image based diagnosis are few of the applications, the advanced solutions in helping diagnotician for diagnostics are tremendous. These tools have reduced the turnaround time and reduced human errors to most extent.

Sports Analytics:

CV can be used to analyze the posture of sports person in training track and provide useful feedpack on their playing style. In open field Games like football and basketball, each player running tracks can be tracked and field playing strategy can be planned accordingly based on the historical player field settings.

Other Areas:

Nowadays new fields areas are coming where we have applications which generates images and videos from text, stabilityAI and imagen are some of them. Photoediting, Cinema editing have leveraged a lot using these tools and productoin costs have comedown significantly. There are many areas, which are left out, which all suggests that CV has become a part in part of our lives and the scope is increasing day by day.

The most recent report includes a comprehensive examination of the global Visual Analytics Market. The global visual analytics market, which is valued at US$ 8,457.6 million in 2023, is forecast to expand at a CAGR of 21.4% from 2023 to 2033, and is expected to be valued at US$ 58,969.8 million by 2033. Significant Investments and Robust demand will make the visual analytics market to look forward for global economic growth in terms of real value contribution. Many Key Camera Solutions providers are trying to get play big in terms of acquiring market share. Small startups are bringing fresh vigour and competitiveness in bringing the cost down and scaling up the solutions to solve novel problems. Small startups are playing keyrole in building diversed innovative solutions which are pivoting many other viral products further in the process pipeline. As a summary, we all can agree upon one thing that this time epoch is defined by AI and computer vision is the major driving force for that. Hope the progress in this field enable humanity to conquer and conquest new arenas and make the best of its race.