Building Scalable Applications with Computer Vision | Statswork

Building Scalable Applications with Computer Vision

Building Scalable Applications with Computer Vision

May 2025 | Source: News-Medical

Introduction

In today’s fast-changing technology landscape, computer vision is taking its place as the driver of digital transformation in many industries. Computer vision is opening automation, instant decision-making, and improved experiences by empowering machines to see and understand visual data. Computer vision is emerging as an important lever for industries that want to scale their operations and create efficiencies in existing workflows, be it retail, healthcare, automotive or urban development.[1]

This article will survey the different ways computer vision is being employed to capture impactful, scalable applications through a series of real-world use cases across industries.

The Role of Computer Vision in Digital Transformation

Computer vision is a research area in artificial intelligence (AI) that enables systems to interpret, understand, and process visual information from its surroundings. It simulates a human’s ability to see, understand, and autonomously act on visual information, but it does so faster, with more accuracy, and can be expanded. If your organization is going through digital transformation, computer vision provides possibilities for automation, image or video value extraction through analysis of visual information, and better ways to create systems that can be enterprise-scaled.[2]

Key benefits of computer vision include:

Step 1: Audio Ingestion & Formatting

The very first thing you should do to load it up is to collect audio files from all your interviews, discussions or focus groups. You can take all of it as .mp3 or .wav files, or even as transcripts as PDFs. As you collect audio files make sure everything is comprehensible audio, complete sentences, timestamped in some sort of order, and otherwise grouped with sorted metadata (speaker ID, session 1/2 number, …etc)

Automating Manual Processes:
Any workflow that has been undertaken manually, including inventory management, product inspection, and quality assurance, can be executed through computer vision systems. The result is spectacular cost savings and efficiency.
Real-Time Data Processing:
Computer vision systems could analyse and process a vast amount of visual data in real time accuracy and as such can improve permit an organization to tweak its decision making based on data, in real time. This is particularly relevant in areas such as autonomous vehicles, smart cities, and healthcare (among others) that require the correct decision to be made in some cases in even less than a split second.
[3]
Scalability:
As an organization grows, so will its visual data capture. Computer vision systems can ingest and manage visual data at the largest scale possible, so no matter the size of the organization, it will be capable of continuing to “scale” the organizations operational capabilities without skipping a beat.
Coupled with other AI systems:
Based on data, computer vision systems can continue to learn from data using additional machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models that can increasingly improve decision making accuracy and the effectiveness of machine learning models over time.

Retail Analytics with Computer Vision

  • Understanding Customer Behaviours: Track customer movement to determine their preferences, improving store merchandising, store layout, and marketing efforts.
  • Inventory Control: Automate real-time inventory management to avoid mis-stocking, over-stocking, and out-of-stocking.
  • Shrinkage Prevention: Identify suspicious behaviour such as theft improvement store safety and reduce losses.[4]
  • Personalized Shopping: Use visual information to facilitate personalized recommendations in the store and online shopping.

Computer Vision in the Smart City Context

  • Traffic Control: Monitor traffic congestion, identify accidents, and adjust traffic lights to reduce congestion and emissions.
  • Public Safety: Leverage surveillance cameras/CCTV to detect suspicious activity, notify law enforcement to accelerate public safety changes, and improve response time.[2]
  • Waste and Resource Efficiency: Monitoring waste collection and cleanliness of streets, optimize parking, and create a computer vision application to forecast public asset/infrastructure maintenance issues.[5]

Autonomous Vehicles

  • Obstacle identification: Cameras, LiDAR, and radar are employed to successfully identify and categorize obstacles (i.e. vehicles, pedestrians) to mitigate the risk of unintended collisions.[3]
  • Real-time decision making: Data from the vision system is used to analyse and develop effective decisions (i.e. stop, turn) in a timely manner that meets safety standards while a vehicle is operational.
  • Scalability: As autonomous vehicles become common, vision-based systems must develop and scale according to a larger, more diverse fleet of vehicles that will operate in a more diverse set of situations.[4]

Case Study: Nestack Technologies and Supply Chain Automation

Use Case

Description

Warehouses Automation

Identify inventory in real-time and automate sorting by size, shape, and colour, which speeds up processing and decreases errors.

Quality Control

Notice defects during manufacturing and packaging to guarantee that customers receive the highest quality products

Scalability

Scalable to larger warehouses and more data while keeping operations efficient.[5]

Building Scalable Computer Vision Solutions

Data Collection & Data Quality: Large, high quality, and relevant datasets are paramount to train effective models. Relevant datasets include a variety of visual data types (images, videos, and sensor data, for example).

Example: Using customer behaviours data collected by a retailer to help redesign a store layout.

Algorithm Development: The algorithms should be able to scale with data, as well as to improve through machine learning and deep learning, as their training data grows.[4]

Example: The algorithms used in self-driving cars will improve as the vehicles drive and collect more driving data and become better at detecting obstacles in the environment.

Edge Computing: Real-time processing is important for some use cases, such as autonomous vehicles and smart cities. Edge computing explores the use of data that can be processed “at the edge” without needing to send data back and forth. This reduces latency.

Example: Smart city traffic cameras will be analysing traffic flow on-zone, rather than sending traffic flow data back and forth to be analysed at centralized servers.

System Integration: Computer vision solutions should be integrated into existing IT infrastructure to support the operation of the current systems. For example, existing cloud platforms, as well as IoT based devices. [5]

Example: A warehouse system that is using computer vision to sort and track inventory utilizing an IoT based inventory management system

Conclusion

Computer vision is a revolutionary technology that is changing industries, making it possible to do processing of big data in real time, automating complicated work processes, and enhancing real-time decisions. Because of its scalability, computer vision allows organizations to manage and process vast amounts of visual data, which is a key driver of growth. Computer vision is an agent of digital transformation all over the world, from improving the customer experience in retail to improving safety and efficiency in autonomous vehicles and smart cities. The applications will continue to be endless as the technology advances, giving organizations even other new ways to innovate and become competitive in a market that will only become more sceptical and dynamic. Unlock the power of this cutting-edge technology with Statswork. Explore tailored solutions to fuel your growth and stay ahead in the digital age.


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References

  1. Wang, G., Tao, L., Di, H., Ye, X., & Shi, Y. (2011). A scalable distributed architecture for intelligent vision system. IEEE transactions on industrial informatics8(1), 91-99.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6062675
  2. Jamieson, L. H., Delp, E. J., Hambrusch, S. E., Khokhar, A. A., Cook, G. W., Hameed, F., … & Shem, K. (1994, October). Parallel scalable libraries and algorithms for computer vision. In Proceedings of the 12th IAPR International Conference on Pattern Recognition, Vol. 2-Conference B: Computer Vision & Image Processing.(Cat. No. 94CH3440-5)(pp. 223-228). IEEE.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/577166
  3. Agrawal, H., Mathialagan, C. S., Goyal, Y., Chavali, N., Banik, P., Mohapatra, A., … & Batra, D. (2015). Cloudcv: Large-scale distributed computer vision as a cloud service. In Mobile Cloud Visual Media Computing: From Interaction to Service(pp. 265-290). Cham: Springer International Publishing.https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-24702-1_11
  4. Jurj, S. L., Opritoiu, F., & Vladutiu, M. (2020, May). Deep learning-based computer vision application with multiple built-in data science-oriented capabilities. In International Conference on Engineering Applications of Neural Networks(pp. 47-69). Cham: Springer International Publishing.https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-48791-1_4
  5. Starzyńska-Grześ, M. B., Roussel, R., Jacoby, S., & Asadipour, A. (2023). Computer vision-based analysis of buildings and built environments: A systematic review of current approaches. ACM Computing Surveys55(13s), 1-25.https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3578552

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