How do we teach computers to understand the visual world? 💻

How do we teach computers to understand the visual world? 💻
Image recognition with Python

Upon reading this description, thousands of neurons are firing in your brain to make sense of what it is you're looking at. Lucky for us, our brain is quite efficient, and we can interpret this message without much effort. This is, however, not the case for computers. How come we can decipher some text or describe objects we're looking at quite easily? And why could a computer struggle to tell the difference between a cat and a dog? In these talks, we will answer the questions: Why do we want a computer to see like we do and how can our computer achieve more human-like vision?

#Event Schedule:
19:30 - 19:35 – Welcome!
19:35 - 20:15 – How do we teach computers to understand the visual world?
20:15 - 20:55 – Workshop: Reading license plates from cars
20:55 - 21:00 – Bye bye!

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How do we teach computers to understand the visual world?
Speakers: Daniel Oliemans & Rodrigo Hammerly

#Abstract:
In this first session, we will lay out the fundamentals of Computer Vision to you. In the field of Computer Vision, we strive to let the computer make decisions based on visual cues like a human would. What is it that makes us humans able to understand pictures or documents? Why is this challenging for a computer? And how do we make the computer see things like we do? At the end of this session, you will know some basic methods of image pre-processing and you will be ready to join us in our live coding session that follows.

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Workshop: Reading license plates from cars
Speakers: Daniel Oliemans & Rodrigo Hammerly

#Abstract:
In the second session, we will take you through a live coding session. In our small proof-of-concept, we will write a program in Python, OpenCV and Tesseract to read the license plate of a car. We will make use of the pre-processing techniques discussed during the presentation and some other tricks to make sure that we can confidently read the characters on the license plate! At the end of this session, you will have the minimum required knowledge to start experimenting yourself. You will also gain familiarity with some of the industry standard tools used.

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#About: Daniel Oliemans
Daniel is a senior consultant for Capgemini (Blue Harvest). He is working as a DevOps engineer at one of the biggest banks in The Netherlands, building APIs and using Computer Vision to automate document processing. In his free time, he works on a Java-based game and occasionally some mobile (android) development. A graduated English teacher, but has been working at Capgemini for almost 4 years now.

#About: Rodrigo Hammerly
Rodrigo is a senior Full stack developer, during his more than 14 years of professional experience, he has worked with a wide range of technologies from desktop to mobile and embedded applications to frontend and backend solutions. For the past two years he has been focusing on building computer vision and data extraction solutions at one of the biggest banks in the Netherlands. He likes to think out of the box and solve problems that may look impossible to attain for other people.