Glossary

What is computer vision?

Computer vision is the area of AI that lets computers understand images and video. It covers tasks such as reading text from scanned documents, recognising and counting objects, spotting defects on a production line and describing what a photo shows. Each of these used to need its own specialised model. General AI models that handle images can now do many of them.

Why it matters for a business

Much business information exists only as images: scanned invoices, photographed delivery notes, product photos, screenshots in support tickets. Reading them is often a more valuable use of AI than generating pictures. Accuracy depends heavily on the input. A clean printed form on a steady template is close to solved; handwriting, dense tables, poor scans and unusual scripts are where errors appear. A misread figure comes back as a plausible number rather than an error, so totals still need checking.