Computer vision

Subfield of Artificial intelligence where the idea is to get a computer to "understand" a scene. Frequent goals include:

• Finding specific objects in the scene
• Identifying faces
• Mapping a scene to a three-dimensional model of the scene, so that (e.g.) a robot could navigate within the scene
• Estimating the three-dimensional poses of humans and their limbs

A very difficult task, but one with a small number of commercial successes.

Interestingly, biological vision (cats have been extensively studied) seems to have lots of "hardware" assist, that is, special "circuitry" to find lines, etc. However, most computer vision has been done strictly with software.