Terminology for Digitally Interpretting Environment

Question

I am looking into coding a program that can Analyse an image and identify objects in that environment (incl their depth and contours/shape).

What is the term for this? Is there a term or area of expertise for this? 'Computer Visualisation' is too broad a term I believe. Maybe Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)? Object Detection? Environment Analysis?

A real world example of what I am looking to develop; autonomous cars with software that can identify and classify objects in its path (pedestrians, curb, centre line, cars, etc.). I am most likely going to use OpenCV, code in C++ and the video stream will come from a cheap drone camera. The drone wont have an infrared/ultra violet hardware component so detecting depth will need to be performed using alternate methods - maybe there are image processing algorithms that can provide a crude idea of the depth of objects.

Answer 1

This falls within the broad field of computer vision. It's related to object recognition, which is about the following problem: given a picture of an object, figure out what kind of object it is. More generally, there's "scene analysis" (I think that's the right phrase): given an image, identify the objects in the scene and work out some understanding of their relative position and relationship.