Learning OpenCV 3

Preface

This book provides a working guide to the C++ Open Source Computer Vision Library (OpenCV) version 3.x and gives a general background on the field of computer vision sufficient to help readers use OpenCV effectively.

Purpose of This Book

Computer vision is a rapidly growing field largely because of four trends:

• The advent of mobile phones put millions of cameras in people’s hands.

• The Internet and search engines aggregated the resulting giant flows of image and video data into huge databases.

• Computer processing power became a cheap commodity.

• Vision algorithms themselves became more mature (now with the advent of deep neural networks, which OpenCV is increasingly supporting; see dnn at opencv_contrib [opencv_contrib]).

OpenCV has played a role in the growth of computer vision by enabling hundreds of thousands of people to do more productive work in vision. OpenCV 3.x now allows students, researchers, professionals, and entrepreneurs to efficiently implement projects and jump-start research by providing them with a coherent C++ computer vision architecture that is optimized over many platforms.

The purpose of this book is to:

• Comprehensively document OpenCV by detailing what function calling conventions really mean and how to use them correctly

• Give the reader an intuitive understanding of how the vision algorithms work

• Give the reader some sense of what algorithm to use and when to use it

• Give the reader a boost in implementing computer vision and machine ...