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Table of contents
1.
Introduction
2.
What Is Computer Vision?
3.
Computer Vision And Image Processing
4.
How Does Computer Vision Work?
4.1.
Different Tasks Performed In Computer Vision
5.
Challenges In Computer Vision
6.
FAQs
7.
Key Takeaways
Last Updated: Mar 27, 2024

Introduction to Computer vision

Author aniket verma
4 upvotes

Introduction

Nobody could have ever thought of capturing the world in just a small frame/screen. Computer vision has brought this unimaginable thought into existence. Now we have images that are portable depictions of the world we live in. Before we had images we used paintings, which used to take a long time. It has become a matter of just a single click. All this has become possible because of Computer vision. Let’s dive deep into what Computer vision is?

Source: Link

What Is Computer Vision?

Computer vision is a popular field of study of how machines/computers can see and perceive images. The motivation behind computer vision comes from how the human eye can see and perceive images with the help of the brain. Computer vision is a special field in AI that teaches machines to see and perceive images. In computer vision, we deal with images and make machines understand with the help of pixels that extracts meaningful information from them. 

Source: Link

We have applications of Computer vision all around us. Right from Google lens to Autonomous vehicles we use computer vision. The most common application that one could relate with is the detection of a person wearing a mask during the Covid-times.  

Computer Vision And Image Processing

These 2 terms are often used synonymously but they hold different meanings and applications. 

The term Image processing deals with the processing of existing images, enhancing them using filters, removing noise from them, and using signal process techniques. It is nothing to do with how to infer important results from a given image.

Whereas, Computer vision, deals with perceiving images and understanding important information from the images, videos to solve common problems.

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We have got a basic essence of what is computer vision is? Let’s look at its working. 

How Does Computer Vision Work?

Computer vision requires a lot of images as datasets we collect using a sensing device. Then computer vision techniques analyze some important information from the images. For example, we want to detect a cat or a dog from the given image. To detect this we need to test up with a lot of varied image datasets to learn the differences between a cat and a dog.

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You might have guessed till now, what kind of algorithms we can use for this task. Obviously, deep learning algorithms are well suited for this kind of application and one of the most common algorithms is CNN.

Different Tasks Performed In Computer Vision

Following is a list of the most common tasks performed in computer vision.

  1. Object detection
  2. Character Recognition
  3. Medical imaging 
  4. Automotive safety
  5. Surveillance for security and monitoring purposes  
  6. Fingerprint Recognition

 

Apart from these there are several important concepts in computer vision to be learned such as object classification, region segmentation, object verification.  

Source: link

Now let’s look at some of the challenges that are faced in computer vision even today.

Challenges In Computer Vision

There has been a lot of research and content that has been published in the field of Computer Vision. But, there are still a lot of challenges faced in this area. Some of the common challenges are listed below.

  1. Computer vision tries to mimic the human eye and the brain which is too good for many tasks. A computer has to suffer from situations like less brightness while detecting objects, unlike the human eye. 
  2. We use a lot of deep learning models for detection and classification in computer vision but sometimes the parameters and features learned are too complex to be understood by humans. So it’s less explainable at times.
  3. A large amount of computational power is required at times to perform the computations as computer vision deals with a lot of images.
    Also see, Sampling and Quantization

FAQs

  1. Mention some applications of computer vision.
    Ans: Computer vision is used abundantly for object detection, region segmentation,  Medical imaging, Surveillance for security and monitoring purposes, etc. 
     
  2. What are the benefits of Computer Vision?
    Ans: The most powerful benefit of computer vision is simplifying human work and carrying out monotonous work at a faster rate. There are very less chances of mistakes if the models are properly trained with a varied dataset of images.

Key Takeaways

In this article we have extensively discussed about what is Computer vision. We discussed how computer vision is different from image processing. We then looked at how computer vision works and some common computer vision tasks. Then we looked at some of the challenges in computer vision. We hope that this blog has helped you enhance your knowledge regarding Computer Vision and if you would like to learn more, check out our articles on coding ninjas. Do upvote our blog to help other ninjas grow. Happy Coding!

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