# The State of Computer Vision Research in Africa

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11617 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11617/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [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)
- [ZeroWaste Dataset: Towards Deformable Object Segmentation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02740/) (2021)
- [11K Hands: Gender recognition and biometric identification using a large dataset of hand images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04322/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Hausa Visual Genome: A Dataset for Multi-Modal English to Hausa Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01133/) (2022)
- [The Classification of Optical Galaxy Morphology Using Unsupervised Learning Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06165/) (2022)
- [Towards a Better Understanding of the Computer Vision Research Community in Africa](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06773/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Machine Intelligence in Africa: a survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02218/) (2024)
- [NaijaNLP: A Survey of Nigerian Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19784/) (2025)
- [Underrepresented in Foundation Model Pretraining Data? A One-Shot Probe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04346/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite significant efforts to democratize artificial intelligence (AI), computer vision which is a sub-field of AI, still lags in Africa. A significant factor to this, is the limited access to computing resources, datasets, and collaborations. As a result, Africa's contribution to top-tier publications in this field has only been 0.06% over the past decade. Towards improving the computer vision field and making it more accessible and inclusive, this study analyzes 63,000 Scopus-indexed computer vision publications from Africa. We utilize large language models to automatically parse their abstracts, to identify and categorize topics and datasets. This resulted in listing more than 100 African datasets. Our objective is to provide a comprehensive taxonomy of dataset categories to facilitate better understanding and utilization of these resources. We also analyze collaboration trends of researchers within and outside the continent. Additionally, we conduct a large-scale questionnaire among African computer vision researchers to identify the structural barriers they believe require urgent attention. In conclusion, our study offers a comprehensive overview of the current state of computer vision research in Africa, to empower marginalized communities to participate in the design and development of computer vision systems.