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Computer Vision Tutorial

Last Updated : 06 Aug, 2025
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Computer Vision (CV) is a branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that helps computers to interpret and understand visual information much like humans. This tutorial is designed for both beginners and experienced professionals and covers key concepts such as Image Processing, Feature Extraction, Object Detection, Image Segmentation and other core techniques in CV.

Before moving into computer vision, it is recommended to have a foundational understanding of:

  1. Machine Learning
  2. Deep Learning
  3. OpenCV

These areas form the foundation of computer vision which helps us apply techniques and algorithms more effectively If we're unfamiliar with any of these topics, we recommend checking out their respective tutorials to build a solid foundation.

Mathematical Prerequisites for Computer Vision

Before moving into Computer Vision, having a foundational understanding of certain mathematical concepts will help us which includes:

1. Linear Algebra

2. Probability and Statistics

3. Signal Processing

Key Concepts in Computer Vision

1. Image Processing

It refers to techniques for manipulating and analyzing digital images. Common image processing tasks include:

1. Image Transformation

2. Image Enhancement

3. Noise Reduction Techniques

4. Morphological Operations

2. Feature Extraction

It involves identifying distinctive elements within an image for analysis and its techniques include:

1. Edge Detection Techniques

2. Corner and Interest Point Detection

3. Feature Descriptors

How Does Computer Vision Work?

  1. Computer Vision works much like the human eye and brain. First, our eyes capture the image and send the visual data to our brain. The brain then processes this information and transforms it into a meaningful interpretation, recognizing and categorizing the object based on its properties.
  2. In a similar way, Computer Vision uses a camera (acting like the human eye) to capture images. The visual data is then processed by algorithms to recognize and identify the objects based on patterns it has learned. However, before the system can recognize objects in new images, it needs to be trained on a large dataset of labeled images. This training enables the system to identify and associate various patterns with their corresponding labels.
  3. For example, imagine providing a computer with thousands of bird song recordings. The system learns by analyzing features like pitch, rhythm and duration. Once trained, it can then recognize whether a new sound resembles a bird song or not.

For more details you can refer to: Steps in Computer Vision

To implement computer vision tasks effectively, various libraries are used:

  1. OpenCV: Mostly used open-source library for computer vision tasks like image processing, video capture and real-time applications.
  2. TensorFlow: A popular deep learning framework that includes tools for building and training computer vision models.
  3. PyTorch: Another deep learning library that provides great flexibility for computer vision tasks for research and development.
  4. scikit-image: A part of the scikit-learn ecosystem, this library provides algorithms for image processing and computer vision.

For more details you can refer to: Computer Vision Libraries

Deep Learning for Computer Vision

Deep learning has greatly enhanced computer vision by allowing machines to understand and analyze visual data and its key deep learning models include:

1. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs)

Convolutional Neural Networks are designed for learning spatial hierarchies of features from images and its key components include:

2. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)

It consists of two networks (generator and discriminator) that work against each other to create realistic images. There are various types of GANs each designed for specific tasks and improvements:

3. Variational Autoencoders (VAEs)

They are the probabilistic version of autoencoders which forces the model to learn a distribution over the latent space rather than a fixed point, some other autoencoders used in computer vision are:

4. Vision Transformers (ViT)

They are inspired by transformers models to treat images and sequence of patches and process them using self-attention mechanisms, some common vision transformers include:

5. Vision Language Models

They integrate visual and textual information to perform image processing and natural language understanding.

Computer Vision Tasks

1. Image Classification

It involves analyzing an image and assigning it a specific label or category based on its content such as identifying whether an image contains a cat, dog or car.

Its techniques are as follows:

There are various types for Image Classification which are as follows:

To learn about the datasets for image classification, we can go through the article on Dataset for Image Classification mentioned above.

2. Object Detection

It involves identifying and locating objects within an image by drawing bounding boxes around them.

It includes below following Techniques:

Type of Object Detection Concepts are as follows:

3. Image Segmentation

It involves partitioning an image into distinct regions or segments to identify objects or boundaries at a pixel level.

Types of image segmentation are:

We can perform image segmentation using the following methods:

Need for Computer Vision

  1. High Demand in the Job Market: Critical for careers in AI, machine learning and data science across industries like healthcare, automotive and robotics.
  2. Revolutionizing Industries: Powers advancements in self-driving cars, medical diagnostics, agriculture and manufacturing by automating visual tasks.
  3. Solving Real-World Problems: Enhances safety, improves medical imaging and optimizes industrial processes.
  4. Improving Accessibility: It helps people with disabilities through image recognition and sign language translation.
  5. Enhancing Consumer Experiences: It personalizes shopping and improves customer service in retail and entertainment.

Applications of Computer Vision

  1. Healthcare: Used for disease detection and medical image analysis (X-rays, MRIs).
  2. Automotive: Helps self-driving cars to detect objects, lane keeping and traffic sign recognition.
  3. Retail: It helps with inventory management, theft prevention and customer behavior analysis.
  4. Agriculture: It is used for crop monitoring and disease detection.
  5. Security and Surveillance: It recognizes faces and find suspicious activities in security footage.

For more details you can refer to: Applications of Computer Vision


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