Computer vision is a field of AI that enables machines to interpret and understand visual information from the world, such as images and videos. It involves tasks like object detection, image classification, facial recognition, and scene understanding. Computer vision is used in areas like healthcare (medical imaging), security (surveillance systems), retail (self-checkout), automotive (self-driving cars), and agriculture (crop monitoring). It helps automate visual tasks with speed and precision.

Image classification identifies the main object or category present in an image and assigns it a single label (e.g., “cat” or “car”).
Object detection, on the other hand, not only classifies objects but also locates them within the image using bounding boxes.
While classification answers “What is in the image?”, detection answers “What objects are in the image and where are they?”
Object detection is more complex and is used in applications like autonomous driving and surveillance.

OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision Library) is a powerful open-source library used for real-time image processing and computer vision tasks. It supports operations like reading, displaying, resizing, cropping, and filtering images. With OpenCV, developers can easily manipulate images, detect edges, faces, and objects, and apply various transformations. It’s widely used in robotics, surveillance, medical imaging, and automation systems.