Learning OpenCV

What Is Computer Vision?

Computer vision ^[2] is the transformation of data from a still or video camera into either a decision or a new representation. All such transformations are done for achieving some particular goal. The input data may include some contextual information such as "the camera is mounted in a car" or "laser range finder indicates an object is 1 meter away". The decision might be "there is a person in this scene" or "there are 14 tumor cells on this slide". A new representation might mean turning a color image into a grayscale image or removing camera motion from an image sequence.

Because we are such visual creatures, it is easy to be fooled into thinking that computer vision tasks are easy. How hard can it be to find, say, a car when you are staring at it in an image? Your initial intuitions can be quite misleading. The human brain divides the vision signal into many channels that stream different kinds of information into your brain. Your brain has an attention system that identifies, in a task-dependent way, important parts of an image to examine while suppressing examination of other areas. There is massive feedback in the visual stream that is, as yet, little understood. There are widespread associative inputs from muscle control sensors and all of the other senses that allow the brain to draw on cross-associations made from years of living in the world. The feedback loops in the brain go back to all stages of processing including the hardware sensors themselves ...