What is computer vision?
Computer vision is the area of artificial intelligence that gives machines the ability to derive meaning from visual information — images and video. Where a human glances and recognizes a face or reads a sign, computer vision systems learn to do the equivalent from pixels.
Modern computer vision is almost entirely built on deep learning, especially convolutional neural networks, which are well suited to finding patterns in visual data.
Common tasks
- Image classification — what's in this image?
- Object detection — where are the objects, and what are they?
- Facial recognition — identifying people.
- Optical character recognition (OCR) — reading text from images.
- Segmentation — outlining the exact shape of objects.
Where it's used
Computer vision powers medical imaging analysis, quality inspection in manufacturing, self-driving perception, retail checkout, security systems, and the photo organization features on your phone. It's also behind many visual search tools.
The considerations
Like all AI, computer vision reflects its training data and can inherit bias — particularly sensitive in applications like facial recognition. Accuracy, fairness, and privacy are the central concerns when evaluating a computer vision product.