In recent years, computer vision has grown into a key domain for innovation, with more and more applications reshaping businesses and lifestyles. We will start this book with a brief presentation of this field and its history so that we can get some background information. We will then introduce artificial neural networks and explain how they have revolutionized computer vision. Since we believe in learning through practice, by the end of this first chapter, we will even have implemented our own network from scratch!
The following topics will be covered in this chapter:
- Computer vision and why it is a fascinating contemporary domain
- How we got there—from local hand-crafted descriptors to deep neural networks
- Neural networks, what they actually are, and how to implement our own for a basic recognition task
