Book Image

Machine Learning for OpenCV

By : Michael Beyeler
Book Image

Machine Learning for OpenCV

By: Michael Beyeler

Overview of this book

Machine learning is no longer just a buzzword, it is all around us: from protecting your email, to automatically tagging friends in pictures, to predicting what movies you like. Computer vision is one of today's most exciting application fields of machine learning, with Deep Learning driving innovative systems such as self-driving cars and Google’s DeepMind. OpenCV lies at the intersection of these topics, providing a comprehensive open-source library for classic as well as state-of-the-art computer vision and machine learning algorithms. In combination with Python Anaconda, you will have access to all the open-source computing libraries you could possibly ask for. Machine learning for OpenCV begins by introducing you to the essential concepts of statistical learning, such as classification and regression. Once all the basics are covered, you will start exploring various algorithms such as decision trees, support vector machines, and Bayesian networks, and learn how to combine them with other OpenCV functionality. As the book progresses, so will your machine learning skills, until you are ready to take on today's hottest topic in the field: Deep Learning. By the end of this book, you will be ready to take on your own machine learning problems, either by building on the existing source code or developing your own algorithm from scratch!
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Selecting the Right Model with Hyperparameter Tuning

Now that we have visited a wide variety of machine learning algorithms, I am sure you have realized that most of them come with a great number of settings to choose from. These settings or tuning knobs, the so-called hyperparameters, help us control the behavior of the algorithm when we try to maximize performance.

For example, we might want to choose the depth or split criterion in a decision tree or tune the number of neurons in a neural network. Finding the values of important parameters of a model is a tricky task but necessary for almost all models and datasets.

In this chapter, we will thus dive deeper into model evaluation and hyperparameter tuning. Assume that we have two different models that might apply to our task. How can we know which one is better? Answering this question often involves repeatedly fitting different...