Common Pitfalls in Computer Vision & AI Projects (and How to Avoid Them)

Artificial Intelligence : Papers & Concepts

In this episode, we dig deep into the unglamorous side of AI and computer vision projects — the mistakes, misfires, and blind spots that too often derail even the most promising teams. Based on BigVision.ai's playbook "Common Pitfalls in Computer Vision & AI Projects", we walk through a field-tested catalog of pitfalls drawn from real failures and successes.

We cover:

• Why ambiguous problem statements and fuzzy success criteria lead to early project drift

• The dangers of unrepresentative training data and how missing edge cases sabotage models

• Labeling mistakes, data leakage, and splits that inflate your offline metrics

• The trap of being model-centric instead of data-centric

• Shortcut learning, spurious correlations, and how models "cheat"

• Misaligned metrics, thresholds, and how optimizing the wrong thing kills business impact

• Over-engineering vs. solid baselines

• The ambition vs. reproducibility tension (drift, code, data versioning)

• Deployment constraints, monitoring, silent failures, and how AI degrades in the wild

• Fairness, safety, adversarial robustness, and societal risks

• Human factors, UX, privacy, compliance, and integrating AI into real workflows

• ROI illusions: why model accuracy alone doesn't pay the bills

We also reveal their "pre-flight checklist" — a lean but powerful go/no-go tool to ensure your project is grounded in real needs and avoids death by scope creep.

Why listen? This isn't theory — it's a survival guide. Whether you're a founder, ML engineer, product lead, or AI skeptic, you'll pick up concrete lessons you can apply before you spend millions. Avoiding these traps could be the difference between shipping a brittle proof-of-concept and deploying a real, reliable system that delivers value.

Tune in for cautionary tales, war stories, and actionable tactics you can steal for your next vision project.

Resources

1. https://bigvision.ai/pitfalls [PDF]
2. Big Vision LLC - Computer Vision and AI Consulting Services.
3. OpenCV University - Start your AI Career today!