  Computer vision is a broad field of study that encompasses different tasks
(e.g., object detection). Although computer vision is relevant to the African
communities in various applications, yet computer vision research is
under-explored in the continent and constructs only 0.06% of top-tier
publications in the last ten years. In this paper, our goal is to have a better
understanding of the computer vision research conducted in Africa and provide
pointers on whether there is equity in research or not. We do this through an
empirical analysis of the African computer vision publications that are Scopus
indexed, where we collect around 63,000 publications over the period 2012-2022.
We first study the opportunities available for African institutions to publish
in top-tier computer vision venues. We show that African publishing trends in
top-tier venues over the years do not exhibit consistent growth, unlike other
continents such as North America or Asia. Moreover, we study all computer
vision publications beyond top-tier venues in different African regions to find
that mainly Northern and Southern Africa are publishing in computer vision with
68.5% and 15.9% of publications, resp. Nonetheless, we highlight that both
Eastern and Western Africa are exhibiting a promising increase with the last
two years closing the gap with Southern Africa. Additionally, we study the
collaboration patterns in these publications to find that most of these exhibit
international collaborations rather than African ones. We also show that most
of these publications include an African author that is a key contributor as
the first or last author. Finally, we present the most recurring keywords in
computer vision publications per African region.
