Computer vision is the AI application area concerned with extracting information from images or video rather than text. the NRC’s Computer Vision and Graphics team works in this area directly, describing its mandate as running “applied research in 3-dimensional (3D) imaging, including design of 3D imaging systems, data analytics, machine learning, big data visualization, and data-driven simulation”.
the NRC’s Computer Vision and Graphics team applies this work to inspection and quality-control tasks in manufacturing, aerospace, security and health — industrial imaging, guided assembly, airborne-systems data processing, and biometrics among them. The team lists “applied deep learning” and “machine learning for human data analytics” among its core competencies, showing how computer vision, in practice, sits on top of the deep-learning and neural-network techniques covered elsewhere in this glossary rather than being a separate technology.
ISED’s AI advantage blueprint credits the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award — work with deep roots in Canadian research — with the breakthrough behind this field: “This breakthrough has led to major advances in computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing and robotics and many other applications”. Statistics Canada’s Q2 2026 survey of AI use by Canadian businesses’s Q2 2026 business survey groups this specific application as “Machine or computer vision,” reported by 4.6% of AI-using Canadian businesses, up from 3.1% a year earlier.
A manufacturing line camera trained to flag a defective part is a computer-vision system doing exactly the kind of inspection work the NRC’s own team lists as an application area: it takes an image as input and produces a classification — pass or flag — as output, the same input/output shape as the document-scanning example used elsewhere in this glossary, just applied to a physical part on a line instead of a scanned page.
See also deep learning, neural network and natural language processing.
This is one term in a plain-English glossary on how AI actually works and where it fits in a Canadian business.
