Perception

Perception is the first point of contact between an AI system and its environment. A camera image, audio signal, text input, or sensor stream is not meaningful on its own; the system must process it, structure it, and make it usable for decision-making. That is what perception represents. Computer vision, speech processing, OCR, and multimodal systems are among the most visible forms of perception problems. Strong decision-making often depends on strong perception, because if the system misreads the world, the entire downstream reasoning chain becomes weak.