Machine Learning for OpenCV 4 - Second Edition

Getting started with machine learning

Machine learning has been around for at least 60 years. Growing out of the quest for artificial intelligence, early machine learning systems inferred the hand-coded rules of if...else statements to process data and make decisions. Think of a spam filter whose job is to parse incoming emails and move unwanted messages to a spam folder as shown here in the following diagram:

We could come up with a blacklist of words that, whenever they show up in a message, would mark an email as spam. This is a simple example of a hand-coded expert system. (We will build a smarter one in Chapter 7, Implementing a Spam ...