The Story of Computer Vision

What is computer vision? Where has it come from? 20 years ago only a few esoteric Engineers were working on it, but now mass-market products like the Microsoft Kinect, Google’s driverless cars and facial recognition systems are using computer vision in a fast, cheap and effective way. What happened?

One reason is that computer vision requires a lot of processing, and computers have only recently become fast enough to handle the workload needed. However this is not the only reason why computer vision has gone from an academic dream to a consumer reality.