What Is Computer Vision? A Simple Guide
Computer Vision is a form of artificial intelligence that allows a computer to understand images and videos. It can be used when using your phone’s facial recognition or in an app to identify something within an image.
Whilst you may not have noticed that computer vision is already used in everyday life, including in your smartphone, shopping apps, security systems, and healthcare.
What Is Computer Vision?
AI-powered vision is a way of allowing a computer to understand visual data from images, cameras, and videos. The AI models will look for patterns to help recognize objects, faces, and so on.
A common example would be the facial recognition on your phone.
How Does Computer Vision Work?
Firstly, an image or video is inputted into the system. The system will then process this input to look for certain features/patterns. During the training phase the AI models will look at and process large amounts of visual data. They will learn patterns from seeing many examples of different objects.
Once trained, the model will be able to process new images and make predictions. These won’t always be accurate, but the system will have a base to work from.
Where Can this technology Be Used?
Some examples include:
Facial Recognition—To unlock phones and support security systems
Healthcare—Helps doctors to look at medical images
Self-driving—Helps identify roads, signs, and objects around them
Shopping—Helps identify products from images
Security—Helps identify and track objects or find any suspicious activity within camera footage.
Social media—Helps with filters and other image-based features.
Why Is Computer Vision Important?
Manually going through a large set of images can take a long time. these systems can be used to quickly process visual data. This can be useful if you need to analyze many images or want quick results.
There are some limitations to this, however. If there isn’t much lighting, the image is blurry, or the object isn’t recognized, then mistakes can happen. The system will only provide predictions.
Final Thoughts
Computer Vision helps computers understand the visual world. Many tools we use already use visual recognition systems. As AI gets better, this technology will become more prominent within healthcare, transport, security, and smart devices. However, using something as simple as unlocking your phone shows us what it can do.
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