Computer Vision Basics in Microsoft Excel

I find this mind-blowing so I thought other members of the forum might find it interesting also.

Quote from the page:

Computer Vision is often seen by software developers and others as a hard field to get into. In this article, we'll learn Computer Vision from basics using sample algorithms implemented within Microsoft Excel, using a series of one-liner Excel formulas. We'll use a surprise trick that helps us implement and visualize algorithms like Face Detection, Hough Transform, etc., within Excel, with no dependence on any script or a third-party plugin.

Click to expand...

(Visit the url above to see this as an animated gif. And yes, it might look like a picture, but as the window title indicates, it is Excel.)

Nice!?

Computer Vision techniques apply lots of maths to arrays that represent image values (colors, lightness..) to extract some other properties
Excel is made to deal with large arrays of numbers, even if primarily for other purposes, and has lots of advanced formulas to use, so it makes a lot of sense

I like the simple trick made by the author, to set the background color of each cell according to the cell value itself, so the sheet is at the same time both the array and the visualizer ?

JordiCP said:

I like the simple trick made by the author, to set the background color of each cell according to the cell value itself, so the sheet is at the same time both the array and the visualizer

Click to expand...

that's the easy part since it's grayscale.

I don't have a clue how to mark a face tho not even when seeing that outline picture.

sorex said:

that's the easy part since it's grayscale.

Click to expand...

Agree, although I like very much those simple things that produce a great effect.

sorex said:

I don't have a clue how to mark a face tho not even when seeing that outline picture.

Click to expand...

It's like a black box matrioshka. When you open it, you see a bit of code and another black box. Opening it, more code and another black box... I stop opening boxes when the head is about to explode or decide that already have enough info (usually the first leads to the second ?)