From Image Analysis to Computer Vision: Motives, Methods, and Milestones.

Almost as soon as digital computers became available, it was realized that they could be used to process and extract information from digitized images. Initially, work on digital image analysis dealt with specific classes of images such as text, photomicrographs, nuclear particle tracks, and aerial photographs but by the 1960s, general algorithms and paradigms for image analysis began to be formulated. When the artificial intelligence community began to work on robot vision, these paradigms were extended to include recovery of three-dimensional information, at first from single images of a scene, but eventually from image sequences obtained by a moving camera at this stage, image analysis had become scene analysis or computer vision. This paper reviews research on digital image and scene analysis through the 1970s. This research has led to the formulation of many elegant mathematical models and algorithms but practical progress has largely been due to enormous increases in computer power, allowing even brute force algorithms to be implemented very rapidly. Keywords Image processing, Image analysis, Pattern recognition, Scene analysis, Computer vision