Computer Vision
14.8. The whole story!

The field of computer vision is changing rapidly at the moment because camera technology has been improving quickly over the last couple of decades. Not only is the resolution of cameras increasing, they are improving in other ways. They are more sensitive for low light conditions; have less noise; can operate in infra-red (useful for detecting distances); and are getting very cheap. It's becoming reasonable to use multiple cameras, perhaps to give different angles or to get stereo vision.

Despite these recent changes, many of the fundamental ideas in computer vision have been around for a while; For example, the "k-means" segmentation algorithm was first described in 1967, and the first digital camera wasn't built until 1975 (it was a 100 by 100 pixel Kodak prototype).