COVID–19 pandemic has had a negative impact on almost every industry out there. The new reality which is taking shape is made of uncertainty, complexities as well as opportunities.
With WFH (Work From Home) becoming the new normal, the availability of fewer resources to work on site and thanks to numerous restrictions that arose because of the unfortunate pandemic, almost all industries have started gearing up for introducing more automation into their workflows and processes. Automations have, in fact, become the need of the hour to accelerate and become resilient and agile to thrive in the current scenario.
And this is where technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Computer Vision come in.
Computer vision is one of the most promising fields of machine learning, with the potential to deal with a wide array of problems in various industries and sectors. This robust AI technology allows computers to understand and analyze visual data and can be used almost everywhere, from convenience stores, medical diagnostics to driverless car testing.
In this blog, we explore some of the top examples of computer vision and how this technology is impacting specific industries.
1. Food Inspection and Sorting Using Computer Vision
Computer vision is making a significant impact on the food industry with multiple applications ranging from quality checks, product safety to automatic counting and sorting of products.
With several operations involved in the production, packaging, and distribution, computer vision technology can ensure the complete safety and quality of different products at various stages.
These quality control food applications use different computer vision techniques, including image enhancement, feature extraction, image classification, and segmentation to check products during processing for factors such as freshness, contamination, size, shape, and uniformity.
Automated counting and sorting can also be easily achieved using computer vision and machine learning. This helps automatically count the products and sort them based on defects, color, type, size, etc.
2. Retail-Tracking of Customer Behaviour
Online giants such as Amazon have been using their digital platform’s analysis capabilities for a long now. However, there were no tools available to automatically capture the interaction of people with displayed items, and computer vision is smartly closing this gap for the retail industry.
Leveraging the combined power of security cameras, computer vision algorithms can automatically evaluate video material and easily study customer behavior.
An example of this is computer vision technology counting the number of people present in the store at a given point of time, which is especially useful in COVID times as there are restrictions on the maximum number of visitors allowed.
What is even more interesting is the analyses on the individual level, such as the chosen route through the individual department and store. This allows improving customers’ overall experience by optimizing the structure, design, and placement of products and avoiding traffic jams in well-visited departments.
Apart from this, specialized algorithms can also track the attention that individual shelves and products receive from customers and detect the direction of people’s gaze, thus measuring how long any given object is viewed by passers-by.
All in all, computer vision technology allows retailers to understand footfall/foot traffic and evaluate customer behavior within their stores in much more detail. This leads to increased sales, optimized distribution of customers within the store, and minimized time spent in the store.
3. Pet Care – Keeping Track of Your Pet at Home
No more worrying about leaving your pet home alone as computer vision technology allows you to be connected to them all the time and keep them safe. It allows you to see, talk, play with, feed your pet, and understand their behavior remotely.
Apart from this, you can also keep a watch on your pet’s emotions with posture recognition algorithms that watch key areas such as ears, mouth, and tail. The technology helps you understand if your pet is feeling better to become a better pet parent.
To Wrap
The ever-growing need for automation and increasing demand for computer vision systems in emerging/non-traditional applications are among some of the key factors driving the growth of the computer vision market even in traditional industries.
The applications listed above indicate the openness of more and more organizations in adopting the AI-first mindset and clearly show that computer vision will continue being the driving force in the future that transforms industries of varied nature.
