What Is Computer Vision?
Computer vision* 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. T e input data may include some contextual information such as “the
camera is mounted in a car” or “laser range f nder indicates an object is 1 meter away”.
T e 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 f nd, say, a car when you are staring
at it in an image? Your initial intuitions can be quite misleading. T e human brain divides the vision signal into many channels that stream dif erent kinds of information
into your brain. Your brain has an attention system that identif es, in a task-dependent