Reconsidering CO2 emissions from Computer Vision

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the significant CO2 emissions associated with computer vision, highlighting their ethical implications and proposing enforcement as a new pillar of ethical AI to mitigate climate impact.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of CV-related CO2 costs and advocates for incorporating enforcement into ethical AI principles to reduce environmental impact.

Findings

CO2 costs in CV are substantial over time

Current CV practices overlook environmental ethics

Recommendations for reducing CV's carbon footprint

Abstract

Climate change is a pressing issue that is currently affecting and will affect every part of our lives. It's becoming incredibly vital we, as a society, address the climate crisis as a universal effort, including those in the Computer Vision (CV) community. In this work, we analyze the total cost of CO2 emissions by breaking it into (1) the architecture creation cost and (2) the life-time evaluation cost. We show that over time, these costs are non-negligible and are having a direct impact on our future. Importantly, we conduct an ethical analysis of how the CV-community is unintentionally overlooking its own ethical AI principles by emitting this level of CO2. To address these concerns, we propose adding "enforcement" as a pillar of ethical AI and provide some recommendations for how architecture designers and broader CV community can curb the climate crisis.