OpenCV is often studied through a cookbook approach that covers a lot of algorithms but nothing about high-level application development. To an extent, this approach is understandable because OpenCV's potential applications are so diverse. For example, we could use it in a photo/video editor, a motion-controlled game, a robot's AI, or a psychology experiment where we log participants' eye movements. Across such different use cases, can we truly study a useful set of abstractions?

I believe we can and the sooner we start creating abstractions, the better. We will structure our study of OpenCV around a single application, but, at each step, we will design a component of this application to be extensible and reusable.

We will develop an interactive application that performs face tracking and image manipulations on camera input in real time. This type of application covers a broad range of OpenCV's functionality and challenges us to create an efficient, effective implementation...