Intro to Computer Vision

Seeing by Numbers

When you look at a photo of a cat, you see fur, whiskers, and eyes.
When a computer looks at the same photo, it sees a giant grid of numbers.

Each tiny dot in the image (a pixel) has a number representing its color.

• 0 = Black
• 255 = White

Computer Vision is the math used to find patterns in those numbers. "If I see a lot of orange numbers in a triangle shape, that might be a cat's ear."

Reading Text (OCR)

One of the most useful types of computer vision is OCR (Optical Character Recognition).
This is how your phone can scan a document or translate a menu in a foreign language.

1.  **Detection**: First, the AI looks for "blobs" that look like letters.
2.  **Recognition**: It compares those blobs to shapes it knows. "This blob looks 99% like the letter 'A'."
3.  **Context**: Modern AI uses language skills to fix mistakes. If it sees "App1e", it knows you probably meant "Apple".

Object Detection

This is how self-driving cars work. They don't just see "a road." They draw boxes around things:

• [Car]
• [Pedestrian]
• [Stop Sign]

The AI is trained on millions of photos where humans have drawn these boxes. Eventually, it learns to draw them itself.

Conclusion

Computer Vision allows machines to understand the physical world. It turns a camera into a sensor that can read, identify, and navigate.