The short version

Computer vision is the part of AI that reads pixels. A model looks at an image or a video frame and returns something structured: a label, a box around an object, the outline of a shape, a set of body landmarks, or text it found.

That output is only useful when something downstream uses it — a count, an alert, a review queue, a report.

Common tasks

Most vision systems combine a few standard tasks:

  • Classification: what is in this image?
  • Detection: where is each object, as a bounding box?
  • Segmentation: which exact pixels belong to each object?
  • Pose estimation: where are the joints of a person, frame by frame?
  • OCR and document understanding: what text is here, and which field is it?

What makes it work in production

The model is rarely the hard part. Reliable systems depend on consistent capture (camera angle, lighting, resolution), labelled examples that look like real conditions, a clear rule for low-confidence results, and a person who reviews the cases the model is unsure about.

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