Skip to Main Content
Learning OpenCV
book

Learning OpenCV

by Gary Bradski, Adrian Kaehler
September 2008
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
580 pages
20h 7m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Learning OpenCV

Contour Finding

We are finally ready to start talking about contours. To start with, we should define exactly what a contour is. A contour is a list of points that represent, in one way or another, a curve in an image. This representation can be different depending on the circumstance at hand. There are many ways to represent a curve. Contours are represented in OpenCV by sequences in which every entry in the sequence encodes information about the location of the next point on the curve. We will dig into the details of such sequences in a moment, but for now just keep in mind that a contour is represented in OpenCV by a CvSeq sequence that is, one way or another, a sequence of points.

The function cvFindContours() computes contours from binary images. It can take images created by cvCanny(), which have edge pixels in them, or images created by functions like cvThreshold() or cvAdaptiveThreshold(), in which the edges are implicit as boundaries between positive and negative regions.[108]

Before getting to the function prototype, it is worth taking a moment to understand exactly what a contour is. Along the way, we will encounter the concept of a contour tree, which is important for understanding how cvFindContours() (retrieval methods derive from Suzuki [Suzuki85]) will communicate its results to us.

Take a moment to look at Figure 8-2, which depicts the functionality of cvFindContours(). The upper part of the figure shows a test image containing a number of white regions (labeled A ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Learning OpenCV 3

Learning OpenCV 3

Adrian Kaehler, Gary Bradski
Learning OpenCV, 2nd Edition

Learning OpenCV, 2nd Edition

Adrian Kaehler, Gary Bradski
Practical OpenCV

Practical OpenCV

Samarth Brahmbhatt
Machine Learning for OpenCV

Machine Learning for OpenCV

Michael Beyeler, Michael Beyeler (USD)

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596516130Supplemental ContentErrata Page