Programming Computer Vision with Python

Chapter 10. OpenCV

This chapter gives a brief overview of how to use the popular computer vision library OpenCV through the Python interface. OpenCV is a C++ library for real-time computer vision initially developed by Intel and now maintained by Willow Garage. OpenCV is open source and released under a BSD license, meaning it is free for both academic and commercial use. As of version 2.0, Python support has been greatly improved. We will go through some basic examples and look deeper into tracking and video.

10.1 The OpenCV Python Interface

OpenCV is a C++ library with modules that cover many areas of computer vision. Besides C++ (and C), there is growing support for Python as a simpler scripting language through a Python interface on top of the C++ code base. The Python interface is still under development—not all parts of OpenCV are exposed and many functions are undocumented. This is likely to change, as there is an active community behind this interface. The Python interface is documented at http://opencv.willowgarage.com/documentation/python/index.html. See Appendix A for installation instructions.

The current OpenCV version (2.3.1) actually comes with two Python interfaces. The old cv module uses internal OpenCV datatypes and can be a little tricky to use from NumPy. The new cv2 module uses NumPy arrays and is much more intuitive to use.^[31] The module is available as

import cv2

and the old module can be accessed as

import cv2.cv

We will focus on the cv2 module in this chapter. ...