Image Encoder

Definitions

1. A model component that converts image inputs into vector representations that other parts of the system can use for classification, retrieval, generation, or multimodal reasoning. Image encoders are foundational in vision and multimodal AI systems.

   In plain English: A component that turns images into numeric representations for AI use.

   Example: "They reused the image encoder to power both visual search and downstream caption generation."

Related Terms

• Image Tokenizer
• Vision Encoder
• Vision Feature
• Vision Model
• Vision Task
• Visual Grounding
• Visual Instruction
• Visual Understanding