A Practical Introduction to Computer Vision with OpenCV

Preface

Perception is essential in order for any entity to interact in a meaningful way with its environment. Humans draw on many senses (such as sight, sound, touch and smell) to perceive the world. Most machines can only receive input through simple input devices, such as keyboards and mice, or through wired and wireless communication channels. However, in recent years, cameras and microphones have been added as standard parts of computers and mobile devices (such as phones and tablets). At the same time, the speed of these devices has increased significantly, making it possible to start to process this data in a meaningful manner. Computer Vision is about how we can automate image or video understanding on machines. It covers the techniques used to automate tasks ranging from industrial inspection (where the image understanding problem is constrained to one which we could easily address 20 years ago) to video understanding in order to guide autonomous robots so that they can interact in a meaningful and safe manner in a world designed for humans.

This book provides a brief introduction to this exciting field, covering the basics of image processing and providing the reader with enough information to solve many practical problems. Computer vision systems are becoming ubiquitous. They are in our homes (in the interfaces of the games consoles which our children use), in our cameras and phones (providing automatic face detection and red eye removal), on our streets (determining ...