"After fifteen minutes of searching with Google, the majority of web pages give a citation that the person who said this was Marvin Minsky and the student was Gerald Sussman. According to the majority of these quotes, in 1966 Minsky asked Sussman to "connect a camera to a computer and do something with it".
They may indeed have had that conversation but in actual fact, the original Computer Vision project referred to above was set up by Seymour Papert at MIT and given to Sussman who was to co-ordinate a group of 10 students including himself. [2]
The original document outlined a plan to do some kind of basic foreground/background segmentation, followed by a subgoal of analysing scenes with simple non-overlapping objects, with distinct uniform colour and texture and homogeneous backgrounds. A further subgoal was to extend the system to more complex objects.
So it would seem that Computer Vision was never a summer project for a single student, nor did it aim to make a complete working vision system. Maybe it was too ambitious for its time, but it's unlikely that the researchers involved thought that it would be completely solved at the end. Finally, Computer Vision as we know it today is vastly different to what it was thought to be in 1966. Today we have many topics derived from CV such as inpainting, novel view generation, gesture recognition, deep learning, etc."
"After fifteen minutes of searching with Google, the majority of web pages give a citation that the person who said this was Marvin Minsky and the student was Gerald Sussman. According to the majority of these quotes, in 1966 Minsky asked Sussman to "connect a camera to a computer and do something with it".
They may indeed have had that conversation but in actual fact, the original Computer Vision project referred to above was set up by Seymour Papert at MIT and given to Sussman who was to co-ordinate a group of 10 students including himself. [2]
The original document outlined a plan to do some kind of basic foreground/background segmentation, followed by a subgoal of analysing scenes with simple non-overlapping objects, with distinct uniform colour and texture and homogeneous backgrounds. A further subgoal was to extend the system to more complex objects.
So it would seem that Computer Vision was never a summer project for a single student, nor did it aim to make a complete working vision system. Maybe it was too ambitious for its time, but it's unlikely that the researchers involved thought that it would be completely solved at the end. Finally, Computer Vision as we know it today is vastly different to what it was thought to be in 1966. Today we have many topics derived from CV such as inpainting, novel view generation, gesture recognition, deep learning, etc."
[1] http://www.lyndonhill.com/opinion-cvlegends.html [2] https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6125