04. Introducing Tarin

Computer Vision in Industry

To help us learn about computer vision techniques and applications, we have with us an industry expert: Tarin Ziyaee, the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Voyage, a self-driving car company.

At Voyage, computer vision is used in a myriad of applications, for example, the recognition of what state a traffic light is in, or, the detection of lanes, and so on.

One cool thing about computer vision though, is that the techniques that you'll learn about, need not only be used with camera images, but also images created with other sensors. The techniques that you'll learn, will be useful for any data that has spatial coherency.

And spatially coherent data can be thought of as any data that predictably varies over space, like sound, for example. If you hear sound from a speaker close up it will sound very loud, but the farther you get away, the softer the sound will get. And so the volume of a sound can give you spatial information!

So, in addition to cameras, self-driving cars use sensors like radar and LiDAR, which use sound waves and lasers to gather data about a car’s surroundings.