CES 2019 showed us computer vision will go big this year
What was missing
It is inarguable that in this age of neural networks computer vision is impacting a far broader range of consumer-facing products year-over-year. But one thing that struck me as I wandered between booths: There was a noticeable disconnect between the technological focus seen in demonstrations at CES and that in the publications featured at CVPR, the leading conference on computer vision and pattern recognition.
Generative techniques are all the rage among the academics at CVPR, but they were nowhere to be found in the commercial applications I saw at CES. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have recently led us down a dark road of deepfakes and malicious photorealistic hallucination. This topic is most certainly on the minds of major tech companies and will only gain more prominence as our generative architectures become stronger and faster.
So, as content authenticity creeps further into the media’s spotlight, at CES 2020 I’d expect to see more computer vision applications that generate artificial content, as well as those that sniff it out.
Ken Weiner is CTO at artificial intelligence company GumGum.