Aristotle would say that to see is "to know what is where by looking." We wish to process visual information with computers so that we may know what is in the world around us.
Computer vision is the construction of explicit, meaningful descriptions of physical objects from images.
Computer vision is the science that develops the theoretical and algorithmic basis by which useful information about the world can be automatically extracted and analyzed from an observed image, image set, or image sequence from computations made by special-purpose or general-purpose computers.
Computer vision is the study of methods to extract information from images.
Applications of Computer Vision are numerous.
... a process may be thought of as a mapping from one representation to another, and in the case of human vision, the initial representation is no doubt--it consists of arrays of image intensity values as detected by the photoreceptors in the retina. It is quite proper to think of an image as a representation; the terms that are made explicit are the image intensity values at each point in the array, which we can conveniently denote by I(x,y) at coordinate (x,y).... Each value of I(x,y) thus specifies a particular level of gray; we shall refer to each detector as a picture element or pixel and to the whole array I as an image.
Generally, an image function is a vector-valued function of a small number of arguments.
The term monochrome image or simply image, refers to a two-dimensional light intensity function f(x,y), where x and y denote spatial coordinates and the value of f at any point (x,y) is proportional to the brightness (or gray level) of the image at that point.
An image is a spatial representation of an object, a two-dimensional or three-dimensional scene, or another image.
Let F be a homogeneous algebra and X a topological space. An F-valued image on X is any element of X -> F. Given an F-valued image a in X -> F, then F is called the value set of a and X, the spatial domain of a.
An image is a function mapping points into values.