Computer vision: definition

Computer vision is the field of AI that lets machines interpret images and video, from reading a document to recognising an object or inspecting a product for defects.

If NLP is machines understanding language, computer vision is machines understanding pictures. It covers reading text from an image (OCR), spotting objects, checking quality on a production line, and more.

Modern multimodal models fold vision in with language, so a system can look at a photo of a damaged part or a scanned form and reason about it. That is what makes document intelligence and visual inspection practical.

Related terms

Multimodal AI: Multimodal AI is a model that can take in or produce more than one kind of data, such as text plus images, audio, or video, rather than text alone.
OCR (optical character recognition): OCR turns an image of text, such as a scanned invoice or a photo of a form, into machine-readable text, which is the first step in automating any paper-based process.
Deep learning: Deep learning is machine learning that uses many-layered neural networks to learn complex patterns, and it is the approach behind most modern AI breakthroughs.