In particular a background in artificial intelligence is not required.
Computational vision addresses the problem of programming computers to see.
Since the retina of the eye produces data which is then processed by the brain, this question directly relates to that of how the human visual system works. Fundamentally, early vision extracts the 3D structure of a scene from its 2D image. Often we want our representations to be invariant to translation, so that we can recognize an object irrespective of its position in an image. For recognizing three dimensional objects, we may wish our representations to be invariant to arbitrary changes in 3D view, which can dramatically change the image of the object. There have been a number of techniques developed to speed search in object recognition.