Beyond Chatbots: A Practical Guide to Computer Vision, 3D and Multimodal AI

A technical overview published on DEV Community outlines the broad scope of computer vision, emphasizing that the field extends well beyond basic object detection. The article maps out major sub-domains including image classification, video analysis, 3D reconstruction, LiDAR processing, and vision-language models. It explains how raw image data is structured and preprocessed before being fed into deep learning pipelines, and highlights commonly used libraries such as OpenCV, Pillow, and NumPy. The piece also traces the evolution of neural network architectures from early CNNs like LeNet and AlexNet to modern Vision Transformers and multimodal AI systems. Written for software developers, it aims to show how these distinct areas interconnect in real-world projects.