It covers applications across dozens of industries, ranging from agriculture to medicine, self driving cars and even shopping.

All of these applications share the need for computers to figure out what their cameras air seeing and for those computers to tell them what to do next.

This phenomenon is powered by a new generation of sophisticated cameras, especially on smartphones.

Just as the vast computing power needed to process millions of images has become much cheaper, there's one small nation at this industry's forefront.

Israel.

Here things are being led by companies like Mobile I, which uses a dozen cheap cameras to guide prototype autonomous cars right through traffic in 2017 until paid $15.3 billion to acquire this technology.

Israeli startups working in computer vision have attracted more than a $1,000,000,000 in seed and venture capital funding over the past three years.

That's up from just $56 million in 2015.

Israel has a huge advantage a heavy concentration of engineers in a very small area, plus experience that they have built up through military applications, off image analysis technology, the development of massive databases has also given Israeli companies of valuable Head Start.

These include Zebra Medical accuses AI ai to scan millions of M.

R.

I and other images from around the world, eventually guiding radiologist to the slightest sign of disease at a startup called F.

D N A.

Engineers have figured out how to use a picture someone's face to try and reveal rare genetic disorders.

Meanwhile, Tree Go is racing against Amazon to perfect the technology for a cashier less store for cameras, figure out what shoppers having their baskets and charge them automatically.

The system is being trialled in several 100 stores across Israel.

As this industry continues to grow, the applications of computer vision seem almost endless.