Sandra Jardim

The growth in the volume of data generated, consumed, and stored, which is estimated to exceed 180 zettabytes in 2025, represents a major challenge both for organizations and for society in general. In addition to being larger, datasets are increasingly complex, bringing new theoretical and computational challenges. Alongside this evolution, data science tools have exploded in popularity over the past two decades due to their myriad of applications when dealing with complex data, their high accuracy, flexible customization, and excellent adaptability. When it comes to images, data analysis presents additional challenges because as the quality of an image increases, which is desirable, so does the volume of data to be processed. Although classic machine learning (ML) techniques are still widely used in different research fields and industries, there has been great interest from the scientific community in the development of new artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. The resurgence of neural networks has boosted remarkable advances in areas such as the understanding and processing of images. In this study, we conducted a comprehensive survey regarding advances in AI design and the optimization solutions proposed to deal with image processing challenges. Despite the good results that have been achieved, there are still many challenges to face in this field of study. In this work, we discuss the main and more recent improvements, applications, and developments when targeting image processing applications, and we propose future research directions in this field of constant and fast evolution.