Ahmed Fathi Bekhit - Computer Vision and Augmented Reality in iOS: OpenCV and ARKit Applications

This chapter will focus on what computer vision is, why we need it, the evolution of the technology, its different applications, and how it is used in Augmented Reality.

Vision is the ability to analyze and interpret scenes and objects of interest. Human vision has been studied for hundreds of years to understand how the visual process works. The human visual process is one of the most complex processes to understand. In fact, to this day, vision scientists have not yet found a complete answer to how the visual process works. However, vision scientists discoveries on how the human visual process begins and a little beyond that inspired computer scientists to develop what we know today as Computer Vision. Vision researchers and scientists describe that the visual process begins with the eyes processing signals of light and converting them into scenes and images for the brains visual cortex to analyze and interpret. A breakthrough in vision research in the 1950s discovered that the visual process begins by detecting the simple structures and edges of an image to help build up a more detailed interpretation as the visual information becomes more complex. The breakthrough vision research inspired computer scientists to develop the preprocessing Computer Vision algorithms we use today to initiate every computer vision task. Compared to a typical computer today, the human brain computing speed is significantly slower than a computers computing speed, yet the human brain performs vision tasks much faster and significantly better than any computer. Hence, researchers inspiration to develop Computer Vision algorithms has always been the evolution of vision in nature.