Computer vision--Past, present, and future

Abstract Computer vision is concerned with obtaining information about a scene by computer analysis of images of the scene. It can be studied from three viewpoints: modeling biological visual systems (computational vision) , solving practical problems (machine vision) , and deriving descriptions of the scene (image understanding) . Originally, the only scenes that could be dealt with were static and essentially two-dimensional, e.g., documents; but gradually methods of handling three-dimensional scenes and time-varying scenes were developed. Still largely lacking is a theoretical framework for designing solutions to computer vision problems.