Glossary

Image recognition

What is image recognition?

Image recognition, a subcategory of computer vision (CV) and artificial intelligence (AI), is the ability for computer technology to visually recognize people, places, animals, objects and other types of elements through the use of algorithms and machine learning.

While image recognition is related to computer vision, it is important to understand the differences between the two terms. If you relate computer vision and image recognition to human sight, you can think of image recognition as the eyes themselves and computer vision as how the human brain interprets what the eyes see.

There are three main steps involved in the image recognition process:

  1. Data annotation: Large amounts of data must be present for successful image recognition. Once data has been collected, it must be annotated — the human-led task of labeling content to identify what is present in an image as well as its location — using tags, bounding boxes or polygons.
  2. Training: The annotated data is fed to a neural network to teach it to recognize a specific concept. During training, each pixel of an image is analyzed and given a numerical value. The computer uses these numerical values to identify patterns and regularities, which aid in classification of the image.
  3. Making predictions: When trained using enough labeled data, an algorithm should be able to classify an image or indicate whether a specific element is present.

Benefits of image recognition

Image recognition technology can be found in applications such as autonomous vehicles, social media listening, medical image analysis and more. Benefits of this technology include:

  • Efficiency: Business processes such as inventory management, image quality checks and automatic image processing can be automated using image recognition systems.
  • Safety: Image recognition programs are commonly used for content moderation on social media platforms, which aids in the pursuit of a safer online community. Harmful or inappropriate content can automatically be removed or flagged by a system for further review.
  • Accessibility: Image recognition can help visually impaired people identify objects around them using their phone’s camera.

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