What is "computer vision"?

Computer vision is the branch of artificial intelligence focused on letting machines interpret and make sense of visual information from images and video. Systems are trained on huge numbers of labeled pictures so they learn to recognize patterns, edges, shapes, and objects, which lets them identify faces, read road signs, sort photos, or flag suspicious shapes like tumors in a medical scan, often faster and more consistently than a human glancing at the same image.

A high-resolution monitor is just a display device for showing images to people; it does not interpret or understand what is on screen. Eye surgery is a medical procedure performed on a human eye and has no relationship to software analyzing digital images.

Self-driving cars and medical imaging both rely on very similar underlying computer vision techniques, which is one reason breakthroughs in one field, like better object detection for autonomous vehicles, often quickly find their way into unrelated applications like cancer screening.