CS6476 Computer Vision
I was working on an OCR project during the same semester, so I could apply some of the course material at work. That might be the best case for a part-time master’s: learning something and having somewhere to use it straight away.
The semester was intense. The course covered a lot, and the weekly assignments took most of my study time. Knowing some computer vision already didn’t make the workload disappear.
The big lesson for me was to take other students’ project warnings seriously. I kept hearing that the “CNN project is a monster,” but chose it anyway because I thought my previous CNN experience would help. The final project was much more demanding than I expected, and that experience helped far less than I’d hoped. I can’t say how the projects I didn’t choose would have gone, but I underestimated this one.
I finished with 89.27%, a B. I’m not chasing straight As, but being that close still stung a little.
The OCR work made the course worthwhile for me. I would just leave more room for the assignments and be more careful about the final project’s scope.
Preparation note — 22 September 2026: The current course guidance emphasizes Python, linear algebra, vector calculus, and probability. Some practice working with images and basic image-processing operations would also help. That is a more useful starting point than trying to study the entire course before the semester begins.