Explanation:

According to the Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals (AI-900) Official Study Guide and the Microsoft Learn module "Explore computer vision in Microsoft Azure," computer vision is a field of artificial intelligence that enables computers to interpret and understand visual information from the world - such as images or videos.
In this scenario, the task is to count the number of animals in an area based on a video feed. This requires the system to:
* Detect the presence of animals in each frame of the video (object detection).
* Track and count them across multiple frames as they move.
These are classic computer vision tasks, as they involve analyzing visual inputs (video or image data) and identifying objects (in this case, animals). Azure provides services such as Azure Computer Vision, Custom Vision, and Video Indexer, which can perform object detection, counting, and activity recognition using AI models trained on visual datasets.
Why the other options are incorrect:
* Forecasting: Involves predicting future values based on historical data (e.g., predicting sales or weather), not analyzing video feeds.
* Knowledge mining: Focuses on extracting insights from large text-based document repositories, not images or videos.
* Anomaly detection: Identifies unusual patterns in numeric or time-series data, not visual objects.
Therefore, identifying and counting animals in video footage falls under computer vision, since it uses AI to visually detect, classify, and quantify objects in real-time or recorded feeds.