Definition and goals of computer vision

Summary

Computer vision is an interdisciplinary field that focuses on how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From an engineering perspective, it aims to automate tasks that the human visual system can do, while as a scientific discipline it studies the theory behind artificial systems that extract information from images. A central goal of computer vision is to automatically extract, analyze, and understand useful information from one image or a sequence of images so that the results can support decisions and appropriate actions. “Understanding” here means transforming visual data into meaningful descriptions of the world that can be used by reasoning processes, often by disentangling symbolic information from image data using tools from geometry, physics, statistics, and learning theory. The field also spans both theory (developing models and algorithms) and technology (building computer vision systems that apply those models to real data such as video, multi-camera views, 3D point clouds, and medical scans).

Key Points

• 1

  Computer vision enables computers to extract, analyze, and understand useful information from images or video sequences.

• 2

  Its goals include turning visual data into meaningful descriptions that support decisions and actions.

• 3

  The field combines scientific theory (models and algorithms) with engineering practice (building vision systems for real-world data.