03. Welcome to Computer Vision

Computer Vision

You’ve been building up a solid foundation of programming and data analysis skills and, in this section, I’m excited to introduce you to one more self-driving car tool: computer vision.

Computer vision is how machines, like self-driving cars, visually perceive the world and respond to it.
Imagine that you are driving a car; you have to use your senses to notice pedestrians, other cars, bicyclists, and all the road and traffic markings around you.

This is similar to how a self-driving car “sees” the world. It gathers data through cameras and other sensors, and then uses that input to safely navigate and move through the world.

In this lesson, we’ll learn about common computer vision techniques that are used to analyze camera images and extract important information from them like the color or shape of different objects.

We’ll also briefly talk about machine learning and how it’s used in combination with computer vision to give machines a way to learn from data and recognize patterns in images.