<unk>  is the extraction of meaningful information from<unk> s; mainly from digital<unk> s by means of digital<unk>  processing techniques.<unk>  tasks can be as simple as reading bar coded tags or as sophisticated as identifying a person from their face.
Computers are indispensable for the<unk>  of large amounts of data, for tasks that require complex computation, or for the extraction of quantitative information.  On the other hand, the human visual cortex is an excellent<unk>  apparatus, especially for extracting higher-level information, and for many applications — including medicine, security, and remote sensing — human<unk>  still cannot be replaced by computers.  For this reason, many important<unk>  tools such as edge detectors and neural networks are inspired by human visual perception models.
Computer<unk>  largely contains the fields of computer or machine vision, and medical<unk> ng, and makes heavy use of pattern recognition, digital geometry, and signal processing.  This field of computer science developed in the 1950s at academic institutions such as the MIT A.I. Lab, originally as a branch of artificial intelligence and robotics.
It is the quantitative or qualitative characterization of two-dimensional (2D) or three-dimensional (3D) digital<unk> s. 2D<unk> s are, for example, to be analyzed in computer vision, and 3D<unk> s in medical<unk> ng. The field was established in the 1950s -- 1970s, for example with pioneering contributions by
Azriel Rosenfeld, Herbert Freeman, Jack E. Bresenham, or King-Sun Fu.
The applications of digital<unk>  are continuously expanding through all areas of science and industry, including:
medicine
microscopy
remote sensing
astronomy
defense
materials science
manufacturing
security
robotics
document processing
assay plate reading
Object-Based<unk>  (OBIA) is a sub-discipline of geoinformation science devoted to partitioning remote sensing (RS)<unk> ry into meaningful<unk> -objects, and assessing their characteristics through spatial, spectral and temporal scale.
Each of these application areas has spawned separate subfields of digital<unk> , with a large collection of specialized algorithms and concepts -- and with their own journals, conferences, technical societies, and so on.
Image analysis
BET theory
Boil classification
Visible spectrum
Spectroscopy
Cough classification
Chemiluminescence
Absorption spectrum