Computer Vision
5 milestones in AI history
Shakey the Robot
Shakey was the first mobile robot that could reason about its actions. It combined computer vision, natural language processing, and planning to navigate rooms, push objects, and solve simple tasks. It used the A* search algorithm and STRIPS planner.
LeNet: Convolutional Neural Networks
Yann LeCun demonstrated that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) could be trained with backpropagation to recognize handwritten digits. The refined LeNet-5 (1998) achieved 99%+ accuracy on MNIST and was deployed by banks to read checks — running in ATMs for years.
ImageNet: The Dataset That Changed Everything
Fei-Fei Li and her team created ImageNet, a dataset of over 14 million hand-labeled images in 20,000+ categories. Starting in 2010, the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) became the benchmark for computer vision progress.
AlexNet: The ImageNet Moment
AlexNet, a deep convolutional neural network, won the ImageNet competition by a staggering margin — reducing the error rate from 26% to 16%. Trained on two NVIDIA GTX 580 GPUs, it was dramatically deeper and more powerful than previous entries. The AI community was stunned.
ResNet: Deeper Than Ever
Microsoft Research introduced ResNet with skip connections (residual connections), enabling the training of networks with 152+ layers — 8x deeper than previous networks. ResNet won ImageNet 2015 with 3.57% error, surpassing human-level performance (5.1%) for the first time.