Article
2020 China Computer Vision Talent Survey Report
Compiled by Deloitte jointly with Extreme Mart and China Society of Image and Graphics
Published: 22 February 2021
Deloitte together with Extreme Mart and China Society of Image and Graphics, jointly released the 2020 China Computer Vision Talent Survey Report. Computer Vision has the largest market size of AI applications in China, accounting for 34.9%. It is widely used in scenarios such as smart cities and new infrastructure, security, finance, healthcare, e-commerce and retail, and autonomous driving. However, the current ratio of CV talent supply to demand is only 0.09, indicating the extreme shortage of CV talent. This report takes a deep dive on computer vision talent, demonstrates the current status of CV talent in the post-COVID-19 era and analyzes what Chinese organizations and society demand for CV talent, aiming to accelerate the development of computer vision technology and its talent in China.
(Simplified Chinese version only)
By taking the pulse of CV talent，we uncover the following key findings:
I. The current status of CV talent
- More than 70% of CV professionals are located in the first-tier and new first-tier cities with developed regional economy, various industries and rich university resources. The overall talent distribution is highly concentrated.
- Target detection, the fundamental CV research segment, has become one of the most widely adopted technologies in recent CV applications in the China market. It has also become the most frequently researched segment by Chinese CV scholars.
- CV professionals report the higher income level in the "post-COVID-19" era. Additionally, the growth rate of the CV algorithm engineer's average income is increasing tremendously with the increase of their years of service.
- With the wide adoption of computer vision technology, vertical industries have been focusing on developing industry-specific CV applications. In addition to AI and Internet companies, e-commerce, finance, professional services, education, recreational content companies also stand out in CV hires.
II. Demand for CV talent
- Organizations prefer diverse academic backgrounds to promote deep integration of CV with a wide range of disciplines. CV professionals will need both hard and soft skills in the coming years, to improve the hard core capability of using technical skills to solve practical problems on one hand, and enhance the soft skills of problem solving on the other.
- Organizations have realized that the optimization of CV algorithms and models does not solve all the problems in its applications. Therefore, over 60% of surveyed organizations demonstrate a strong demand for AI product managers on top of CV algorithm engineers.
III. Development of CV talent
- We discover the gap between reality and expectation for computer vision technology from three perspectives: CV talent, organizations and universities. This is also a challenge in the development of computer vision, which is the discipline with high integration of theoretical research and engineering practice. In this survey, universities and organizations expressed a strong willingness to collaborate on joint labs and research projects, which is expected to be an important approach for CV talent development.