Computer vision is different from human vision because humans can just look at something and know what it is, but a computer basically just sees a bunch of pixels. It does not automatically know that something is a person or a hand unless we give it a way to recognize it. Humans also understand things based on context which is something computers have a harder time doing.
Some ways we can help the computer see and track things are frame differencing, background subtraction, and brightness thresholding. Frame differencing can tell when something moves by comparing different frames, while background subtraction looks at what is different from the background. Brightness thresholding can also help if the thing we want to track is much lighter or darker than everything around it which i found really interesting and the reading does a good job of exmplaining this to me. I thought it was interesting that sometimes we can make the computer see better just by changing the environment like the lighting or the background instead of making the code more complicated.
I think the tracking part of computer vision makes interactive art really cool because the artwork can actually react to you. Your body or movement can change what happens but I also think it can get a little creepy because the same technology can be used for surveillance ( I have talked about this a lot in Understanding IM class).
There is a difference between walking up to an artwork and choosing to interact with it, and being somewhere where a camera is tracking you without you really knowing what it is doing. I think that makes computer vision interesting but also something artists have to be careful with.