Authors: Fei-fei Li, Stanford

More than half of the human brain is involved in visual processing. While it took mother nature billions of years to evolve and deliver us a remarkable human visual system, computer vision is one of the youngest disciplines of AI, born with the goal of achieving one of the loftiest dreams of AI. The central problem of computer vision is to turn millions of pixels of a single image into interpretable and actionable concepts so that computers can understand pictures just as well as humans do, from objects, to scenes, activities, events and beyond. Such technology will have a fundamental impact in almost every aspect of our daily life and the society as a whole, ranging from e-commerce, image search and indexing, assistive technology, autonomous driving, digital health and medicine, surveillance, national security, robotics and beyond. In this talk, I will give an overview of what computer vision technology is about and its brief history. I will then discuss some of the recent work from my lab towards large scale object recognition and visual scene story telling. I will particularly emphasize on what we call the "three pillars" of AI in our quest for visual intelligence: data, learning and knowledge. Each of them is critical towards the final solution, yet dependent on the other. This talk draws upon a number of projects ongoing at the Stanford Vision Lab.