In plain English
Computer vision is the area of AI focused on helping machines interpret and understand visual information from images and video. It covers tasks such as detecting objects, recognising faces, reading text in a photo, and spotting anomalies in a scan. Like other modern AI, it learns these skills from large collections of labelled images rather than hand-written rules.
A worked example
A medical imaging tool that highlights areas of a scan a radiologist may want to review more closely is using computer vision.
Common confusion
Detecting an object in an image is not the same as understanding the scene. Vision systems recognise patterns of pixels; they do not grasp context the way a person does.