Learning OpenCV

Chapter 14. OpenCV's Future

Past and Future

In Chapter 1 we saw something of OpenCV's past. This was followed by Chapters Chapter 2–Chapter 13, in which OpenCV's present state was explored in detail. We now turn to OpenCV's future. Computer vision applications are growing rapidly, from product inspection to image and video indexing on the Web to medical applications and even to local navigation on Mars. OpenCV is also growing to accommodate these developments.

OpenCV has long received support from Intel Corporation and has more recently received support from Willow Garage (www.willowgarage.com), a privately funded new robotics research institute and technology incubator. Willow Garage's intent is to jump-start civilian robotics by developing open and supported hardware and software infra-structure that now includes but goes beyond OpenCV. This has given OpenCV new resources for more rapid update and support, with several of the original developers of OpenCV now recontracted to help maintain and advance the library. These renewed resources are also intended to support and enable greater community contribution to OpenCV by allowing for faster code assessment and integration cycles.

One of the key new development areas for OpenCV is robotic perception. This effort focuses on 3D perception as well as 2D plus 3D object recognition since the combination of data types makes for better features for use in object detection, segmentation and recognition. Robotic perception relies heavily ...