Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a technique used to reduce the dimensionality of data by transforming correlated variables into a smaller number of uncorrelated variables called principal components. It works by computing the eigenvectors of the covariance matrix of the data, with each eigenvector representing a principal component that captures a different amount of the variance in the data. Dimensionality reduction is achieved by selecting only the first few principal components with the highest eigenvalues to represent the data. PCA has applications in computer vision for tasks like face recognition and image compression.