The diversity of canonical and ubiquitous progress in computer vision: A dynamic topic modeling approach

•Propose a quantitative method to identify research trend and researcher interest.•Capture the diversity of research behavior between the dynamic of trend and interest.•Invent three direction measurements and four metrics to calculate the similarities.•Five types of research trends and six types of authors are found in computer vision.•Most of authors choose mainstream studies over long- or short-term directions.