How can the camera on my phone identify when it’s seeing text or a face or somethingelse?

Question

I mean, aren’t all things the camera sees are just ones and zeros? How do they program it to understand what’s what?

In: 2

Answer 1

How do we recognise faces in a picture? The simplest way is that we scan over the image and look for obvious features – two eyes, a nose and a mouth for example. When we find something that matches that we can then examine it in more detail and see if it has the other elements that make up a human.

Computers do the same, but instead of looking at a page and looking for colours, they scan through all the ones and zeros and look for the same patterns.