CMU talk: Massively Scalable Computer Vision - The Next Great Challenge

Craig Coulter, HyperActive Technologies, Inc.
Monday, December 12, 2005

Computer vision technologies are only beginning to emerge from research and development and into broader application. Scaling vision algorithms presents enormous, unaddressed challenges to the community and is creating a whole new branch of computer vision research: Massively Scalable Systems.

Consider for a moment the challenges of simply testing a computer vision application. Testing is currently peformed by hand, through visual inspection, and usually by the research group itself, across a relatively small batch of test images - usually a few hundred to a few thousand.

HyperActive Technologies is applying computer vision technologies into the quick-service and general retail markets - applications where the same core set of detection and tracking algorithms will operate in tens of thousands of locations daily. Developing a "retail grade" computer vision application for a 20,000 store chain will require building a system that processes some 40 billion images per day, or 15 trillion images per year. Achieving this goal will require the community to completely rethink its approach to application development, testing, and in-field performance monitoring.

This talk will focus on exploring the challenges of defining a new area of computer vision research: "Massively Scalable Computer Vision Systems".


Speaker Bio
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Dr. R. Craig Coulter is Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of HyperActive Technologies, Inc. a Pittsburgh area robotics that addresses the real-time decision-making problems plaguing high-volume, high-demand markets like quick-service restaurants, retail, and grocery stores.

Dr. Coulter is a robotics scientist focused on the commercialization of intelligent robotics technologies. He began his work at the National Robotics Engineering Consortium (NREC), where he organized a project with Ford Motor Company to commercialize a revolutionary vision-based position estimation system that he co-invented. He co-founded Highlander Systems, Inc., a vision systems engineering company; Tpresence, Inc., an early distributed computing company, where he served as CEO; and Mammoth Ventures, a firm focused on the development of new robotics-related intellectual property, where he currently serves as Managing Partner. In 2001, Dr. Coulter co-founded HyperActive Technologies, Inc. Dr. Coulter is a graduate of the PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science.