Handbook

Computer vision is the interdisciplinary scientific field that develops theories and methods allowing computers to extract high-level information from digital images or videos. From an engineering perspective it seeks to automate perceptual tasks normally performed by the human visual system. Generally, vision is difficult because it is an inverse problem, where only insufficient information is available about the objects of interest in the image data. Physics-based mathematical and statistical models as well as machine-learning methods are used to assist in the task. Current real-world applications are wide-ranging, and include optical character recognition, machine inspection, retail object recognition, 3D model building, remote sensing, medical imaging, autonomous driving, motion capture, surveillance, face recognition, biometrics, and many others. This course provides an introduction to fundamental concepts and an opportunity to develop a real-world application of computer vision.