Computer vision is an area of computer science, mathematics, and electrical engineering. It includes ways to acquire, process, analyze, and understand images and videos from the real world in order to mimic human vision. Also, unlike human vision, computer vision can also be used to analyze and process depth and infrared images.

Computer vision is also concerned with the theory of information extraction from images and videos. A computer vision system can accept different forms of data as an input, including, but not limited to, images, image sequences, and videos that can be streamed from multiple sources to further process and extract useful information from for decision making.

Artificial intelligence and computer vision share many topics, such as image processing, pattern recognition, and machine learning techniques, as shown in the following diagram:

The typical tasks of computer vision include the following:

Don't worry about this jargon as of now. We will explore most of these concepts in detail in the later chapters.