<graphics, artificial intelligence> The identification of
objects in an image. This process would probably start with
image processing techniques such as noise removal,
followed by (low-level) feature extraction to locate lines,
regions and possibly areas with certain textures.
The clever bit is to interpret collections of these shapes as
single objects, e.g. cars on a road, boxes on a conveyor belt
or cancerous cells on a microscope slide. One reason this is
an AI problem is that an object can appear very different
when viewed from different angles or under different lighting.
Another problem is deciding what features belong to what
object and which are background or shadows etc. The human
visual system performs these tasks mostly unconsciously but a
computer requires skillful programming and lots of processing
power to approach human performance.
