Chapter 1. Overview
What Is OpenCV?
OpenCV [OpenCV] is an open source (see http://opensource.org) computer vision library available from http://opencv.org. In 1999 Gary Bradski [Bradski], working at Intel Corporation, launched OpenCV with the hopes of accelerating computer vision and artificial intelligence by providing a solid infrastructure for everyone working in the field. The library is written in C and C++ and runs under Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. There is active development on interfaces for Python, Java, MATLAB, and other languages, including porting the library to Android and iOS for mobile applications. OpenCV has received much of its support over the years from Intel and Google, but especially from Itseez [Itseez] (recently acquired by Intel), which did the bulk of the early development work. Finally, Arraiy [Arraiy] has joined in to maintain the always open and free OpenCV.org [OpenCV].
OpenCV was designed for computational efficiency and with a strong focus on real-time applications. It is written in optimized C++ and can take advantage of multicore processors. If you desire further automatic optimization on Intel architectures [Intel], you can buy Intel’s Integrated Performance Primitives (IPP) libraries [IPP], which consist of low-level optimized routines in many different algorithmic areas. OpenCV automatically uses the appropriate IPP library at runtime if that library is installed. Starting with OpenCV 3.0, Intel granted the OpenCV team and OpenCV community ...
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