optical

Definition

"By way of light or images." In ML it appears mainly as the O in OCR — optical character recognition — signalling that the input arrives as pixels rather than as already-encoded text. The word marks that distinction: reading characters off a scan or photo, as opposed to parsing a text file. It rarely refers to optical hardware here.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Explained: FreeFlow — Optical Flow with a Hierarchical Transformer and No Flow-Specific PartsFreeFlow: A Bias-free Hierarchical Transformer for Optical Flow Estimation