How Robots Make Sense of Our World

Robot Readable World is a short film assembling footage from computer vision experiments -- in other words, "what robots see" as they look at video footage. Or, more appropriately, "What you'd see if you were a Terminator."

The footage is strangely beautiful, though it takes about two minutes to get really interesting (the whole thing is only five minutes long). We start with cars, and note how robots detect cars and draw boxes around them. Then we start tracking people. Subsequent footage includes the flow of cars (identifying cars versus trucks, finding the direction of traffic), picking out individual humans from crowds, finding facial features, and of course,

terminating John Connor

helping.

One note on terminology: the term "robot" here isn't 100% accurate, as not all of this footage was actually seen by robots. But at least it was all viewed by computers of some sort -- and I, for one, welcome our new computer-vision overlords.