Here monocular means ‘with one eye’ and binocular means ‘with both the eyes’. In humans, depth perception is ascertained through both Monocular and Binocular cues. The details in the environment that allow us to perceive depth are called Depth Cues. So to understand how depth perception is used for computer vision, it is better to understand how we, humans perform depth perception. We know that artificial intelligence is based on the assumption that the process of human thoughts and abilities can be mechanized. It uses laser beams to measure the relative distance of an object by illuminating it with the laser light and then measuring the reflections using sensors. Here LiDAR is one of the many methods used for depth perception. In technology, there are many applications of depth perception, including self-driving cars. It also helps us to determine the relative speed of an object. It is crucial to our everyday life and prevents us from bumping into things. It tells us about the depth of every object or we can say the relative distance of every object from our eyes.

It is the ability of our brain to perform depth perception which is the result of human evolution.

But we are still able to perceive the world in 3D. The world that we observe is three dimensional, but the image formed on the human retina is two dimensional, which means the input to our brain is in two dimensions (2D). Depth perception is the visual ability to perceive the world in three dimensions (3D) and the ability to estimate the distance/depth of an object from the source.

Depth perception definition