Book Image

Learning OpenCV 3 Application Development

By : Samyak Datta
Book Image

Learning OpenCV 3 Application Development

By: Samyak Datta

Overview of this book

Computer vision and machine learning concepts are frequently used in practical computer vision based projects. If you’re a novice, this book provides the steps to build and deploy an end-to-end application in the domain of computer vision using OpenCV/C++. At the outset, we explain how to install OpenCV and demonstrate how to run some simple programs. You will start with images (the building blocks of image processing applications), and see how they are stored and processed by OpenCV. You’ll get comfortable with OpenCV-specific jargon (Mat Point, Scalar, and more), and get to know how to traverse images and perform basic pixel-wise operations. Building upon this, we introduce slightly more advanced image processing concepts such as filtering, thresholding, and edge detection. In the latter parts, the book touches upon more complex and ubiquitous concepts such as face detection (using Haar cascade classifiers), interest point detection algorithms, and feature descriptors. You will now begin to appreciate the true power of the library in how it reduces mathematically non-trivial algorithms to a single line of code! The concluding sections touch upon OpenCV’s Machine Learning module. You will witness not only how OpenCV helps you pre-process and extract features from images that are relevant to the problems you are trying to solve, but also how to use Machine Learning algorithms that work on these features to make intelligent predictions from visual data!
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning OpenCV 3 Application Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Morphological operations


So far in this chapter, we have looked at image thresholding operations. As we have stated a number of times, the end-result of these thresholding operations is binary images. These binary images are, of course, not very pleasant to look at! This means that we don't really create them for their aesthetic value. Rather, they serve as inputs to the subsequent processing stages of our image processing pipeline. The solutions to most of the common computer vision and image processing problems can be viewed as a pipeline, rather than a single algorithm. The outputs of the current operation serve as inputs to the next and so on until we reach the desired output stage. Image thresholding is one such stage that you might come across in any pipeline (and so is image smoothing/blurring).

What we are going to do in this section is learn in brief about one more operation that makes frequent appearances in the image processing pipelines that we just discussed-morphological operations...