There were quite a few interesting announcements during WWDC 2020. Without a doubt, enhancements in SwiftUI 2.0 and Apple’s bold decision to move away from Intel for Mac in favor of in-house Silicon chips became the major talking points.
But that didn’t stop Apple from showcasing its computer vision ambitions once again this year. The Vision framework has been enhanced with some exciting new updates for iOS 14.
Through iOS 13, Apple expanded the breadth of the Vision framework by introducing a variety of requests ranging from text recognition to built-in image classification and improvements in face recognition and detection.
In iOS 14, Apple has focused many of its efforts on increasing the depth of its Vision framework.
Primarily, the new Vision requests introduced in iOS 14 enable new ways to perform action classification and analysis, which will help developers build immersive gameplay experiences, fitness apps, and sports coaching-based applications (something that’s has seen a huge demand in recent times).
Let’s dig through the new Vision requests and utilities that were announced at WWDC 2020.
Vision Contour Detection Request
Contour detection finds outlines of shapes in an image. It looks to join all the continuous points that have the same color or intensity. This request finds good use in scenarios like coin detection and finding other objects in an image and grouping them by size, aspect ratio, etc.
Here’s the sample code used to initiate a Vision contour detection reque
Like every Vision request, the idea is simple: pass the Vision request into a VNImageRequestHandler for images, and get the results in VNObservation.
Core Image is a really handy framework for pre-processing images for contour detection requests. It helps smooth textures, which in turn lets us simplify contours and mask parts that aren’t in the region of interest.
The below screenshot shows what happens when you use the wrong filter for pre-processing (adds more contours instead of reducing them, in the left image):
VNGeometryUtils is also a handy utility class introduced this year for analyzing contour shapes, bounding circles, area, and diameter.
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