Deep Learning for Visual Understanding: Part 2 [From the Guest Editors]

Visual perception is one of our most essential and fundamental abilities that enables us to make sense of what our eyes see and interpret the world that surrounds us. It allows us to function and, thus, our civilization to survive. No sensory loss is more debilitating than blindness as we are, above all, visual beings. Close your eyes for a moment after reading this sentence and try grabbing something in front of you, navigating your way in your environment, or just walking straight, reading a book, playing a game, or perhaps learning something new. Of course, please do not attempt to drive a vehicle. As you would realize again and appreciate profoundly, we owe so much to this amazing facility. It is no coincidence that most of the electrical activity in the human brain and most of its cerebral cortex is associated with visual understanding. Computer vision is the field of study that develops solutions for visual perception. In other words, it aims to make computers understand the seen data in the same way that human vision does. It incorporates several scientific disciplines such as signal processing, machine learning, applied mathematics, sensing, geometry, optimization, statistics, and data sciences to name a few.