Last updated on September 7, 1995 at 6:30 PM
| Computer Graphics | The creation of images. |
|---|---|
| Image Processing | The enhancement or other manipulation of the image--the result of which is usually another image. |
| Computer Vision | The analysis of image content. |
This can be illustrated by the following table:
| Output | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Image | Description | ||
| Input | Image | Image Processing | Computer Vision |
| Description | Computer Graphics | AI? | |
Computer vision itself goes by many aliases: machine vision, image analysis,
image understanding, computational vision (my preference).
Each has its own connotation and is used by different parts of the community.
Traditionally ``computer vision'' and ``machine vision'' imply endowing
a computer or other machine with visual capabilities, bringing to mind
robotics and other autonomous computer-guided devices.
``Image analysis'' and ``image understanding''
generally refer to figuring out the content of
images--a part of computer vision but without the implication of
the computer ``seeing'' around itself.
``Computational vision'' is starting to gain favor as a term that refers
to modelling visual processes by computational means.
Hopefully, as the course goes on you'll gain a better appreciation for
these terms and find one that best fits what you're interested in.
The three fields of computer vision, image processing, and computer graphics often work together to produce amazing results. One might take an image, perform some image processing to clean it up, do some computer vision to segment a particular part or create a description of it, and computer graphics to display the result in a visually useful way. Here is one example and another.
In our next lecture, we'll talk about different types of images, where they come from, and what people do with them.
© Bryan S. Morse, 1995
