Comment by casual_slacker

> Early methods conceived of vision as searching for edges, or generalized cylinders, or in terms of SIFT features. But today all this is discarded.

These aren't discarded, they are part of ML vision networks today. Edges are one of the 3x3 convolutions that a network can learn, SIFT/etc are the dense / clustering nets, I'll admit I just googled Generalized Cylinders (very interesting). There are others like SLAM as well.