The Field of Computer Vision Has Changed So Much in Just 5 Years

The field of Computer Vision has undergone such a drastic change during the course of my PhD that it's almost hard to believe. In 2011 when I entered, Computer Vision was its own area with its own problems. It was buzzing with activity, there were people working on object detection, scene classification, attribute classification, action classification, pose estimation, etc, etc. The feeling was that we were going to have all of these systems in all of these different areas that we solve one by one and then we plug it together somehow and produce all these intermediates that we pass on elsewhere. I spent a lot of time thinking about what "solved" Computer Vision would look like - we'd extract everything out of the image and pass it on to some other people who worked on planning, or something like that.