Introduction
Computer vision is one of the core areas of artificial intelligence (AI), and focuses on creating solutions that enable AI applications to "see" the world and make sense of it.
Consider these scenarios:
- A hospital wants to detect and track surgical instruments in real-time during operations.
- A retail company needs to classify products like shoes, shirts, and electronics, in images into categories.
- A wildlife preservation organization needs to identify the animals that walk through video footage.
- A city's transportation department needs to read and extract text from images of license plates.
- A manufacturing company wants to analyze visual patterns for defects.
Of course, computers don't have biological eyes that work the way ours do, but they're capable of processing images; either from a live camera feed or from digital photographs or videos. This ability to process images is the key to creating software that can emulate human visual perception. In this module, we'll examine the building blocks that underlie modern computer vision solutions.