Eh? Strange. 9/11 was, as terrible a tragedy as it was, great for computer vision. DHS and DOD were throwing money left and right at researchers and companies

Eh? Strange. 9/11 was, as terrible a tragedy as it was, great for computer vision. DHS and DOD were throwing money left and right at researchers and companies (through SBIRs), though mostly for surveillance, activity recognition, vehicle recognition, not industrial machine vision, as far as I'm aware. I wouldn't expect a large company to pivot, necessarily, but if the branch head wanted to do a startup, he probably missed out on a huge opportunity.