I've read in several articles/answer written by CS (grad) students or other people that the advanced knowledge of pure math that's required for certain areas of computer vision is sometimes too high for the CS student themselves, and requires the involvement actual math people.

I do wonder if it's true at all? I don't certainly pose this question from a negative view. As a new computer vision researcher who just switched from pure math, I find the math behind CV interesting, but the questions asked to be of different nature. But can the CV researchers with CS background not answer those math questions?


closed as off-topic by David Ketcheson, Christian Clason, Kirill, nicoguaro, hardmath Apr 12 '16 at 0:51


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    $\begingroup$ Be aware that the definition of "pure math" might differ between mathematicians and computer scientists... In particular, from what I have seen of computer vision, most of what is currently used (e.g., variational analysis, nonlinear/nonsmooth optimization) would be classed as "applied math" by mathematicians. $\endgroup$ – Christian Clason Apr 10 '16 at 16:13
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    $\begingroup$ To add to Christian's comment, a lot of the optimization techniques used in image processing are new to many computer scientists working in computer science. This is a fairly common experience these days as mathematics is finding new areas of application all of the time. This question would be much more interesting if there was some discussion of particular areas of mathematics that are being used in computer vision. $\endgroup$ – Brian Borchers Apr 10 '16 at 22:21
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    $\begingroup$ I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's not about computational science. $\endgroup$ – David Ketcheson Apr 11 '16 at 7:43
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    $\begingroup$ @DavidKetcheson I disagree about it being off-topic (you could ask the same question about the pros and cons of increasing mathematization of biology), but it is too vague (and would likely lead to pure opinion-based answers). $\endgroup$ – Christian Clason Apr 11 '16 at 8:27
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    $\begingroup$ As anecdotal information, I was approached last week by an out-of-state recruiter for a firm that seems to use some computer vision technology to produce dental appliances. I never spoke to anyone but the low-level recruiter, but the job requirements write-up he shared mentioned algorithms and data structures and computational geometry. He said that they were having trouble filling the position due to programmers often not having enough experience or interest in the mathematical aspects. $\endgroup$ – hardmath Apr 11 '16 at 22:25