What are the major open problems in computer vision?

Computer vision faces several major open problems that challenge both researchers and developers. Three key issues include robustness and generalization, real-time processing for complex tasks, and interpretability of models. These problems persist despite advances in deep learning and hardware, requiring new approaches to bridge the gap between research and practical applications.

One significant challenge is creating models that generalize reliably across real-world conditions. While models excel in controlled settings, they often fail with unexpected variations like lighting changes, occlusions, or adversarial attacks. For example, a self-driving car’s object detector might misclassify a pedestrian wearing uncommon clothing or fail under heavy rain. Techniques like data augmentation and domain adaptation help but don’t fully address the problem. Models trained on datasets like ImageNet also struggle with “long-tail” scenarios—rare objects or edge cases absent from training data. This limitation highlights the need for better methods to handle diverse, unpredictable environments without requiring massive labeled datasets.

Another open problem is achieving real-time performance for computationally intensive tasks, especially on resource-constrained devices. High-resolution video analysis, 3D reconstruction, or video understanding tasks (e.g., action recognition) demand significant processing power. While architectures like YOLO optimize speed for object detection, complex tasks like instance segmentation or multi-object tracking still face latency challenges. Developers often trade accuracy for speed, such as using lighter models like MobileNet, which may miss fine details. Edge devices like drones or AR glasses compound this issue due to thermal and power limits. Optimizing models through pruning or quantization helps but risks destabilizing performance, leaving room for breakthroughs in efficient algorithm design.

Finally, interpretability remains a critical hurdle. Deep learning models often act as “black boxes,” making it hard to diagnose errors or build trust in safety-critical applications like medical imaging. For instance, a model might correctly detect a tumor in an X-ray but for the wrong reasons, such as focusing on irrelevant artifacts. Tools like Grad-CAM provide partial insights by highlighting influential image regions, but they don’t explain higher-level reasoning. This lack of transparency complicates debugging and raises ethical concerns, particularly in biased systems like facial recognition tools that underperform for certain demographics. Solving this requires not just technical improvements but also frameworks to align model decisions with human-understandable logic.