Image analysis and computer vision has always been important in industrial applications. With the popularization of cell phones with powerful cameras and Internet connections, they are also increasingly being generated by the users. Therefore, there are opportunities to make use of this to provide a better user experience.
In this chapter, we will look at how to apply techniques you have learned in the rest of the book to this specific type of data. In particular, we will learn how to use the mahotas computer vision package to preprocess images using traditional image-processing functions. These can be used for preprocessing, noise removal, cleanup, contrast stretching, and many other simple tasks.
We will also look at how to extract features from images. These can be used as input to the same classification methods we have learned about in other chapters. We will apply these techniques to publicly available datasets of photographs.