ECE 661: Computer Vision

ECE 661

Computer Vision

by

Avinash Kak

Next Offering: Fall 2024

Links to homework problems and their best solutions for previous offerings of this class:
Fall 2006 Fall 2008 Fall 2010 Fall 2012 Fall 2014 Fall 2016 Fall 2018 Fall 2020 Fall 2022

PREREQUISITES FOR THIS CLASS
This class is substantially self-contained. All you need in order to enroll for this class is that you be a graduate student in engineering, computer science, quantitative psychology, mathematics, etc.

1.	Course Intro and Demos of Working Computer and Robot Vision Systems
2.	World 2D: Representing and Manipulating Points, Lines And Conics Using Homogeneous Coordinates (scroll corrected: January 17, 2021)
3.	World 2D: Projective Transformations and Transformation Groups (scroll corrected: September 26, 2014)
4.	Characterization of Distortions Caused by Projective Imaging and the Principle of Point/Line Duality (scroll corrected: November 29, 2022)
5.	Estimating a Plane-to-Plane Homography with Angle-to-Angle and Point-to-Point Correspondences (scroll corrected: September 10, 2020)
6.	World 3D: Representing Points, Planes, and Lines (scroll revised: September 18, 2012)
7.	World 3D: Quadrics, Transformation Groups, and the Absolute Conic (scroll revised: September 24, 2020)
8.	Visual Perception and Edge Detection (Sobel, LoG, Canny) (scroll corrected: September 26, 2016)
9.	Extracting Interest Points and Their Descriptors (with Harris, SIFT, and SURF) in Image Pairs and Establishing Point-to-Point Correspondences Between the Images (scroll corrected: September 24, 2020)
10.	SuperPoint: A Deep-Learning Based Framework for Detecting Keypoints in Images (Updated: Sept 19, 2024) NOTE: You need some background in Deep Learning to fully appreciate this lecture. Click here for more info.
11.	Estimating Homographies with Linear Least-Squares Minimization (scroll corrected: November 30, 2022)
12.	Robust Homography Estimation with the RANSAC Algorithm (scroll corrected: November 30, 2022)
13.	Refining Homographies with Nonlinear Least-Squares Minimization (Gradient-Descent, Levenberg-Marquardt, and DogLeg) (scroll corrected: November30, 2022) In addition to the scroll that you can view by clicking on the title of this lecture, I will also be illustrating nonlinear least-squares with my Python module that you can access by clicking here. (module updated: October 6, 2022)
14.	Binary Image Processing and Morphology Several concepts of binary image processing and image morphology are explained with the help of the demos from the Examples directory of my Watershed module for image segmentation. You can access it by clicking here. (Updated: October 5, 2020)
15.	Image Segmentation A part of this lecture is based on the same Watershed algorithm for image segmentation that is used in Lecture 14. You can access the module that illustrates this algorithm by clicking here. (Updated: October 5, 2020)
16.	Measuring Texture and Color --- Part 1 (Updated: October 17, 2024)
17.	Measuring Texture and Color --- Part 2 (Updated: October 17, 2024)
18.	Modeling the Camera (scroll corrected: November 30, 2022)
19.	Some Very Cool Properties of the Camera Projection Matrix (scroll corrected: November 29, 2022)
20.	Camera Imaging of Various Geometrical Forms (including the Absolute Conic) (scroll corrected: November 29, 2022)
21.	Camera Calibration --- Zhang's Algorithm (scroll corrected: November 29, 2022)
22.	Hough Transform for Extracting Low-Level Features in Images (scroll corrected: November 30, 2022) If you click on the title of this lecture, you will get a scroll that talks about the fundamentals of Hough Transformation. However, if you click here, you can download a publication that describes a very successful example of vision-guided indoor mobile-robot navigation and self-localization by using a particularly efficient implementation of the Hough Transform.
23.	Epipolar Geometry and the Fundamental Matrix (scroll corrected: November 29, 2022)
24.	Binocular Stereo: Image Rectification and Scene Reconstruction (scroll revised: November 29, 2022) The rectification part of the lecture also includes the famous Loop and Zhang algorithm presented in my "Reader" that you can view by clicking here. (Updated: November 10, 2024)
25.	Dense Stereo Reconstructions with Semi-Global Matching (Updated: November 14, 2024)
26.	Variational Autoencoding for Generative Data Modeling, and PCA and LDA for Dimensionality Reduction (Updated: November 18, 2024)
27.	Going Beyond PCA and LDA: Data Clustering on Manifolds (Updated: November 30, 2022)
28.	The AdaBoost Algorithm for Designing Boosted Classifiers (Updated: December 3, 2022)
29.	Automatically Learning the Most Discriminating Features through Class Entropy Minimization (Updated: December 5, 2022) For practical aspects of how to use decision trees, I recommend going through the documentation page for my Decision Tree module. Click here for that. (Updated: May 14, 2016)
30.	Image Segmentation using Graph Partitioning Algorithms (posted: December 8, 2022)
31.	Active Learning for Reducing the Human Burden of Annotating the Ground-Truth for Solving Complex Problems in Object Detection
32.	Iterative Closest Point (ICP) Algorithm for Registering a Photo with a Database Image of the Same Scene The ICP algorithm is explained with the help of my Python module of the same name. You can access the module by clicking here. (Updated: November 25, 2017)

WHY THE HANDWRITTEN "SCROLLS" FOR THESE LECTURE NOTES? Think of these scrolls as expository art. Because of the difficulty of correcting the scrolls, my goal was to create the best possible explanations in the least amount of space. It has often taken me several days of non-stop work to produce a single scroll. Every sentence required careful thought and multiple attempts at expressing the thought on a regular piece of paper before writing it in the scroll. Writing by hand on paper creates a mind-set and a mental discipline that are simply not there in a document written on a computer. From my experience in teaching with these scrolls, while most students love them (eventually during the course of a semester if not at the very outset), some do not. But, then, that's true of all art forms.

FEEDBACK WELCOME! If you have any comments or any suggestions for improving these notes, please send an email to kak@purdue.edu with the string "Comments on ECE 661" in the subject line to get past my spam filter. Any suggestions that I incorporate would be duly acknowledged.

A NOTE FOR INSTRUCTORS USING THESE "SCROLLS": About the "scrolls" that are handed out in class, they look best when printed in color on long sheets of light yellow paper of size 11 in x 17 in (28 cm x 44 cm). Obviously, this is not the size of paper you can use with a home printer. However, many office copying/printing machines these days can make copies of this size without difficulty.