Industry and Academic Research in Computer Vision

TL;DR

This study analyzes the evolving relationship between industry and academic research in computer vision, highlighting trends in industry sponsorship, research topics, and citation behaviors across top conferences.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive quantification of industry involvement and examines its influence on research topics and citation patterns in computer vision.

Findings

Industry-sponsored papers are increasing in top conferences.

Research topics are similarly distributed between industry and academia.

Industry papers are cited more frequently than academic ones.

Abstract

This work aims to study the dynamic between research in the industry and academia in computer vision. The results are demonstrated on a set of top-5 vision conferences that are representative of the field. Since data for such analysis was not readily available, significant effort was spent on gathering and processing meta-data from the original publications. First, this study quantifies the share of industry-sponsored research. Specifically, it shows that the proportion of papers published by industry-affiliated researchers is increasing and that more academics join companies or collaborate with them. Next, the possible impact of industry presence is further explored, namely in the distribution of research topics and citation patterns. The results indicate that the distribution of the research topics is similar in industry and academic papers. However, there is a strong preference towards citing industry papers. Finally, possible reasons for citation bias, such as code availability and influence, are investigated.