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

Image thresholding basics


Having learnt about binary images, let's now focus our attention on one of the processes that generate binary images: image thresholding. In the generic sense of the term, a threshold is some sort of a benchmark against which values are compared. Extending the same definition into our realm of computer vision, we use a threshold to compare pixel values. Let's try to understand how this happens.

The input to the thresholding functions are grayscale images, which means that every pixel has an intensity value in the range of 0 to 255 (inclusive). First, we predefine a threshold value for the operation. As expected, the threshold that we select is passed on to the function that implements the thresholding operation as a parameter. Now, what a thresholding operation essentially does is that it traverses the image pixel by pixel. At every pixel, it compares the intensity value with the threshold and decides on the corresponding output intensity value based on the result...