Recent Advances

Many advances have been made in recent years based on machine learning, in particular with deep learning methods for image processing, natural language processing, and more general data analytics. Many companies are now enthusiastic about data analytics, using data in a wider sense to gain insights into customer profiles or other data mining tasks.

Machine learning is an important part of a data analytics engine. Data analytics often require additional care such as data security to ensure privacy, the ability to acquire and maintain large data collections, and also to make results available in a form useful for humans. We will not delve into many of these aspects but concentrate instead on the data modeling aspects.

Computer vision (CV)

One of the most visible impacts of deep learning has been made in computer vision through convolutional neural networks. The basic applications in this area are mostly based on recognition networks and methods for semantic segmentation. However, such methods have now also advanced object localization, object tracking, and scene understanding, to name but a few.

Some examples from my own projects are shown in the figure below. The left-hand image shows semantic segmentation to identify and localize crop and weed for a robotic farming application. The right-hand image shows an example of fish tracking for aquaculture applications.