Computer Vision Syndrome

Years of attempts to make machines see can have their effects on a person. It happens to me, rather often, that I walk down a street and try analyzing the current scene as if I were an instance of an algorithm I wrote, and noting where it would succeed and where it would fail. One of the side effects of this behavior is that as time progresses, I notice more and more objects that I fail to recognize myself on first site. Yes, contrary to the nice perception of the human visual system as a perfect one, we also tend to miss-classify objects (or miss them altogether) every once in a while.

So in a sense, instead of perfecting machines to see as I do, I find bugs in my own internal recognition system.

It is interesting that I am able to notice those bugs, as a normal system doesn't usually have a corrective behavior - it is either right, or wrong. Sometimes it even gives a confidence ("I am 90% sure this is an image of a cat, but of course there's a 10% chance it's a butterfly"). What the system doesn't do, is have another look from a different angle (if available), or give it more thought (address the problem to higher level analysis?).

When I first read the term "computer vision syndrome" on the web, I thought it referred to this strange behavior I adapted of (somewhat obsessively) introspecting my visual system as I live my day to day life. I was disappointed to find out that it is a condition caused by sitting too long near a computer for uninterrupted periods of time. Not that it is much of a comfort, but I probably have that as well.

Still, I'd like to make an abuse of notation and coin "computer vision syndrome" as a term describing scientists (or mere enthusiasts) in the field of computer vision dedicating their mind to the process of seeing -even when sometimes, they shouldn't.