[SciPy-dev] SciPy and vision

[Keith Curtis]

Hi David;

On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 5:02 AM, David Warde-Farley <dwf at cs.toronto.edu>wrote:

> On 4-Jan-10, at 12:32 AM, Keith Curtis wrote:
>
> > I think you guys should keep working on your image processing
> > support and build a better place for vision researchers to easily
> > jump into. Is this in progress?
>
> An image processing SciKit was started back in August and has made
> leaps and bounds since then. The idea with SciKits is that they may
> eventually become part of SciPy.
>
>        http://stefanv.github.com/scikits.image/
>

That is great to hear.

As a commercial programmer, spending years learning the ins and out of a
language or a component was not a problem, but for researchers and other
dabblers with shorter attention spans, being able to jump in and be
productive in hours rather than days is an important consideration. The
layers of a computer vision stack are several and complicated, so let's get
going. There must be 1000s of vision PhDs out there re-inventing the wheel.

I hope the image processing SciKit is easy to install and use once SciPy is
setup. The dependency on OpenCV is a bit of a hassle because then you have
to deal with the OpenCV build issues, but I think as an incremental solution
that is fine. But big chunks of OpenCV is code already implemented by SciPy
so the native / natural port would be a lot smaller. Unlike JPEG converters
or other things that make sense to just call from Python, vision code is not
mature like this yet.

In fact, I don't understand why there are so many slightly different
algorithms which appear to do the same things. (Anyone know?) I wonder if it
is like "sort" where there are many different ways to do it, but in reality
just a handful are enough for an entire industry. Or maybe not, but today it
does require a native Python stack to let people easily experiment. With
OpenCV, you can use the Python wrappers, but if you want to change what the
code under the wrappers is doing, your task just got a lot harder.

I don't have any great ways on growing your community, but I hope outreach
is also an important part of your efforts.

-Keith
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