Udacity Computer Vision Preview

Udacity is offering a new 3-month Computer Vision Nanodegree as a part of its School of Artificial Intelligence. Based on our experience with completing the first term of their Self-Driving Car Nanodegree this program has the potential to extremely interesting, very challenging, and personally rewarding.

To get a sample of what this program has to offer we completed the free preview of the Nanodegree program and we are seeing that this program lives up the expected high standards of Udacity’s courses.

Here is a high-level overview of the topics covered:

Additionally, one exciting, new feature that Udacity has added is the integration of Jupyter notebooks into the courses – previously courses used less-than-ideal coding interface. The notebooks are a more comfortable interface that we are all more familiar with.

Subjects

Computer vision pipeline – the series of steps that a computer vision application goes through for acquiring, processing, and performing an action on images.

Convolutional neural networks – apply deep learning to the processing of images.

Object detection – applying the above techniques to identify objects in images.

 

Reality

Here is where the reality check comes in. While Udacity may indicate that a course like this will take approximately 5 – 10 hours per week, in reality, based on the first term of the Self-Driving Car Nanodegree, this could take much, much more time. If this program is anywhere near as challenging as the self-driving car program, you can easily expect to double that amount of time for at least some portions of the course. 

Now, that investment of time is not necessarily a bad thing – the self-driving car program was extremely personally rewarding and exposes students to the application of cutting-edge deep learning and computer vision technology that is in the process of revolutionizing the world around us. Based on the preview of this course this program has the potential to do much of the same with a heavier focus on computer vision.

Note: there is a $200 USD discount on the price of the course if you enroll by the end of the day April 24, 2018.

See more of our posts on Udacity and Deep Learning.