By the Power of Grayscale

94 pointsposted 5 days ago
by surprisetalk

20 Comments

ryukoposting

14 minutes ago

It may come as a surprise to some that a lot of industrial computer vision is done in grayscale. In a lot of industrial CV tasks, the only things that matter are cost, speed, and dynamic range. Every approach we have to making color images compromises on one of those three characteristics.

I think this kind of thing might have real, practical use cases in industry if it's fast enough.

teiferer

3 hours ago

Appreciate the old school non-AI approach.

amelius

2 hours ago

But have a look at the "Thresholding" section. It appears to me that AI would be much better at this operation.

vincenthwt

28 minutes ago

It really depends on the application. If the illumination is consistent, such as in many machine vision tasks, traditional thresholding is often the better choice. It’s straightforward, debuggable, and produces consistent, predictable results. On the other hand, in more complex and unpredictable scenes with variable lighting, textures, or object sizes, AI-based thresholding can perform better.

That said, I still prefer traditional thresholding in controlled environments because the algorithm is understandable and transparent.

Debugging issues in AI systems can be challenging due to their "black box" nature. If the AI fails, you might need to analyze the model, adjust training data, or retrain — a process that is neither simple nor guaranteed to succeed. Traditional methods, however, allow for more direct tuning and certainty in their behavior. For consistent, explainable results in controlled settings, they are often the better option.

Legend2440

14 minutes ago

It indeed would be much better. There’s a reason the old CV methods aren’t used much anymore.

If you want to anything even moderately complex, deep learning is the only game in town.

do_not_redeem

40 minutes ago

sure, if you don't mind it hallucinating different numbers into your image

Legend2440

17 minutes ago

Right, but the non-deep learning OCR methods also do that. And they have a much much lower overall accuracy.

There’s a reason deep learning took over computer vision.

do_not_redeem

5 minutes ago

GP is talking about thresholding and thresholding is used in more than just OCR. Thresholding algorithms do not hallucinate numbers.

rmonvfer

an hour ago

I’m not a “C” person but I’ve really enjoyed reading this, it’s quite approachable and well written. Thank you for writing it.

atum47

4 hours ago

I was working on a image editor on the browser, https://victorribeiro.com/customFilter

Right now the neat future it have is the ability of running custom filters of varied window size of images, and use custom formulas to blend several images

I don't have a tutorial at hand on how to use it, but I have a YouTube video where I show some of its features

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3pnEx5_eGm9rVr1_u1Hm_LK6...

kazinator

3 hours ago

Referencing "By the power of Grayskull!"

macleginn

an hour ago

As an aside, "For the honor of grayscale" would work no worse here.

mkaic

2 hours ago

IIIII HHHAAAAAVE THE POWERRRRR

ggm

an hour ago

Didn't recognize George Smiley in those photos. Which makes sense, given he's an espiocrat.

nakamoto_damacy

4 hours ago

From a 70s kid to an 80s kid, well done!

Xenoamorphous

4 hours ago

Ditto. I’ve upvoted this based solely on the amazing title. Best toyline ever.

dcminter

4 hours ago

I too applaud this terrible (amazing) pun.