Computer vision is the delightful and slightly perplexing endeavor of teaching computers how to look at pictures and not immediately declare them all “a chair.” It’s the art of making machines understand that a cat is not a loaf of bread and that roads are for driving, not dancing. Armed with math and machine learning, computer vision examines shapes, colors and patterns with the intensity of a student cramming for an exam, except it never sleeps and doesn’t mind being wrong occasionally.
This miraculous wizardry powers self-driving cars that stare anxiously at traffic lights, drones that joyfully map out forests and face-recognition systems that pretend to know who you are better than your own relatives. Of course, computer vision can be hilariously tricked into thinking a tiger is a striped sofa, but that’s part of its charm. It’s a curious, tireless learner, scanning the universe one pixel at a time and quietly hoping no one asks it to interpret modern art.
This miraculous wizardry powers self-driving cars that stare anxiously at traffic lights, drones that joyfully map out forests and face-recognition systems that pretend to know who you are better than your own relatives. Of course, computer vision can be hilariously tricked into thinking a tiger is a striped sofa, but that’s part of its charm. It’s a curious, tireless learner, scanning the universe one pixel at a time and quietly hoping no one asks it to interpret modern art.
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