[Nov 5-26] Computer Vision ONLINE Course

This three-week course will introduce the use of techniques in computer vision for creating interactive artworks and applications.. By using sophisticated algorithms which surreptitiously analyze video and camera streams to identify and track people, faces, moving bodies, and colors, we can add a playful–or slightly sinister–dose of interactivity to our work.

Gene Kogan
Wed, Nov 5 through Wed, Nov 25 2014
Cost: $200 (members + students) $225 (regular)

Pay with PayPal or Credit Card on our Payment Page here

US-Customers see the bottom of this page.

Location: This class is held online, you need to have internet connection to watch videos and engage in the forums. Shortly before the class starts you will get a link with further instructions how to take part in it.

Location: This is an online class, hosted by Tenlegs.com.. Video lectures will be posted on the main page, and we will continuously discuss new topics, questions, ideas, and code bugs on the forum page.

In collaboration with Tenlegs, a network for artists to connect, collaborate, earn and learn, Harvestworks offers this class as part of it’s online TEAMLab class program. Online means that anyone – and in any timezone – can take it and make it work with your schedule. Initially and throughout the course you’ll have access to video lectures created specifically for this workshop, a series of hands-on challenges meant to give you experience building your own artworks, and live sessions to ask questions, get answers, and go deeper with the material.

The class will run three weeks. Video lectures will be released once a week, to be watched on the students own time. There are no mandatory days to be available, as long as you are able to keep up with the new material each week.

This intensive, three-week ONLINE course introduces students to the field of computer vision and its use in art installation and interactivity. Computer vision refers to the ability of machines to infer contextual information from images and video.

Nothing seems to embody the classical good/evil dilemma of technology quite like computer vision does. It can be used for immensely good applications, like preventing distracted drivers from getting into car accidents, and it can be used with more ambiguous or sinister intentions, as in surveilling public spaces and compromising privacy. This course aims–playfully but seriously–to promote engaging with the technology itself so that we may be better informed when the time comes to negotiate these two sides of the coin. And make art along the way.

In short, we will learn how to create programs which track objects, colors, bodies, and faces, and how to use that stream of data to add dynamics and interactivity to our applications.

During the first half of the course, we will introduce the necessary programming constructs to create several DIY CV routines for quantifying motion and basic object/color/brightness tracking, and we will show several examples of how to turn this data into actionable parameters. In the second half, we will introduce OpenCV, a powerful, cross-platform, open-source computer vision library which will greatly increase the reliability and scope of our tracking routines.

Timetable

Week 1: Crash course/review of Processing language and environment, basic graphics, interactivity, and getting images on the canvas.
Week 2: Basic CV techniques and applications — loading movies and camera feeds, motion detection and quantification, simple color and brightness tracking
Week 3: Using OpenCV — filtering and pre-processing, blob tracking, face detection, locating and tracking people in cameras, adding parameters and interactivity to installations.

Requirements

You need to have internet connection to watch videos and engage in the forums. You also need a computer with processing installed — you can download a free copy from http://www.processing.org.

There will be around 90 minutes of video lectures released each week. Students will need to commit 3-4 hours per week for watching them, going through supplementary materials, and doing some basic practice and implementation. But as in any art practice, you’ll get more out of it if you can make another 5-10 hours to practice more and create on your own time.

Prior to the class you may also log into tenlegs.com and create an artist portfolio: https://www.tenlegs.com/signup

About The Instructor

Gene Kogan is a media artist and programmer who writes free software for performing arts and researches emerging technologies. His work can be seen at genekogan.com.

US Customers can also purchase the class here:

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