Computer vision enables machines to understand things through visual inputs, sometimes even exceeding the capabilities of human vision. For decades, computer vision has been a niche technology, because computer vision equipment has been large, expensive, and complex to use. But recently, products like the Microsoft Kinect and vision-based automotive safety systems have demonstrated that computer vision can now be deployed even in cost-sensitive applications, and in ways that are easy for non-specialists to use. The term "embedded vision" is often used to refer to the incorporation of visual intelligence into a wide range of systems.