A revealing genealogy of image-recognition techniques and
technologies
Today's most advanced neural networks and sophisticated image-analysis
methods come from 1950s and '60s Cold War culture--and many biases and
ways of understanding the world from that era persist along with them.
Aerial surveillance and reconnaissance shaped all of the technologies
that we now refer to as computer vision, including facial recognition.
The Birth of Computer Vision uncovers these histories and finds
connections between the algorithms, people, and politics at the core of
automating perception today.
James E. Dobson reveals how new forms of computerized surveillance
systems, high-tech policing, and automated decision-making systems have
become entangled, functioning together as a new technological apparatus
of social control. Tracing the development of a series of important
computer-vision algorithms, he uncovers the ideas, worrisome military
origins, and lingering goals reproduced within the code and the products
based on it, examining how they became linked to one another and
repurposed for domestic and commercial uses. Dobson includes analysis of
the Shakey Project, which produced the first semi-autonomous robot, and
the impact of student protest in the early 1970s at Stanford University,
as well as recovering the computer vision-related aspects of Frank
Rosenblatt's Perceptron as the crucial link between machine learning and
computer vision.
Motivated by the ongoing use of these major algorithms and methods, The
Birth of Computer Vision chronicles the foundations of computer vision
and artificial intelligence, its major transformations, and the
questionable legacy of its origins.
Cover alt text: Two overlapping circles in cream and violet, with black
background. Top is a printed circuit with camera eye; below a person at
a 1977 computer.
