# Towards a Better Understanding of the Computer Vision Research Community in Africa

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.06773 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06773/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Bias and Fairness in Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09635/) (2019)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04068/) (2020)
- [Discrimination in Online Ad Delivery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.6822/) (2013)
- [Continental-Scale Building Detection from High Resolution Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12283/) (2021)
- [Envisioning Communities: A Participatory Approach Towards AI for Social Good](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01774/) (2021)
- [Towards decolonising computational sciences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14258/) (2020)
- [The Classification of Optical Galaxy Morphology Using Unsupervised Learning Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06165/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [The State of Computer Vision Research in Africa](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11617/) (2024)
- [Machine Intelligence in Africa: a survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02218/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Computer vision is a broad field of study that encompasses different tasks (e.g., object detection). Although computer vision is relevant to the African communities in various applications, yet computer vision research is under-explored in the continent and constructs only 0.06% of top-tier publications in the last ten years. In this paper, our goal is to have a better understanding of the computer vision research conducted in Africa and provide pointers on whether there is equity in research or not. We do this through an empirical analysis of the African computer vision publications that are Scopus indexed, where we collect around 63,000 publications over the period 2012-2022. We first study the opportunities available for African institutions to publish in top-tier computer vision venues. We show that African publishing trends in top-tier venues over the years do not exhibit consistent growth, unlike other continents such as North America or Asia. Moreover, we study all computer vision publications beyond top-tier venues in different African regions to find that mainly Northern and Southern Africa are publishing in computer vision with 68.5% and 15.9% of publications, resp. Nonetheless, we highlight that both Eastern and Western Africa are exhibiting a promising increase with the last two years closing the gap with Southern Africa. Additionally, we study the collaboration patterns in these publications to find that most of these exhibit international collaborations rather than African ones. We also show that most of these publications include an African author that is a key contributor as the first or last author. Finally, we present the most recurring keywords in computer vision publications per African region.