Artificial Intelligence and Its Six Subsets, Part One: Computer Vision

Article by Lewis Huxtable IJYI 

The buzzword of late 2024 and onwards, Artificial Intelligence has very much become a Zeitgeist of this time but more than that, Artificial Intelligence has become a prominent focus for businesses and the technology industry.

Generative AI has played a big role in pushing the technology to the mainstream, yet there’s so much more to AI than just asking ChatGPT for a creative pasta recipe. AI offers multiple use-cases, the technology for these use cases can be filtered into Six Subsets: Narrow AI, General AI, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, and Expert Systems.

Today we’ll focus on Computer Vision.

Here at IJYI, being a Technology Consultancy, cutting edge tech has always been an area of the industry we’ve both embraced and specialised in. Computer vision is a field of artificial intelligence and computer science that focuses on enabling computers to interpret and understand the visual world. Computer Vision can handle a variant of tasks but today we’ll be focussing on Object Recognition.

Object Recognition is using a computer for locating and identifying specific objects within an image or video stream. Object detection algorithms can detect multiple objects of interest and outline their boundaries.

Recently at IJYI, I was tasked with finding a way to utilise this technology for the safety of Bumble Bees. Last summer the invasion of Asian Hornets had apiarists around the country worried about hives being destroyed. The first challenge was outlining which “model” to use.  AI is built around mathematical frameworks known as “models”, different models serve different purposes. Through trial and error, I chose YOLO V8 (You Only Look Once Version 8).

I trained the model to recognize bees by supplying it with hundreds of images, a process that took about seven hours. Once trained, I was able to process video examples through the model, resulting in the outcomes shown below.

Computer Vision continues to be a talking point in the tech world and for most of our interactions. We’ll continue this series in future newsletters.  If you would like to discuss AI and tech, you can contact IJYI at https://www.ijyi.com/ and find me on X at @Sci_Soft_Sports.