image recognition

    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.

   (1997-07-20)