[ttul]

In 1999, our “computer vision” guy - a masters student - struggled mightily to recognize very simple things in a video stream from a UAV. Today, we would take this for granted. But back then, the computation was for all intents and purposes entirely non-existent. At best he was hoping to apply an edge detection kernel maybe once every two seconds and see if he could identify some lines and arcs and then hand code some logic to recognize things.

[Ono-Sendai]

What? There were pentium 2 and 3 machines back then that could certainly do more than a edge detection kernel every 2 seconds. Or do you mean on an embedded CPU?

[bandrami]

Software is iterative. At least when I was studying in the mid 90s people had really only just gotten the idea to do a Fourier transform of an image and look for high frequencies to indicate borders. Add ~3 decades of each generation of grad student doing slightly better than the last one.

[ttul]

Indeed, this had to happen onboard a small airplane. Should have clarified that.