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)

Summary

In this chapter, we learned about SVMs in all their forms and flavors. We now know how to draw decision boundaries in 2D and hyperplanes in high-dimensional spaces. We learned about different SVM kernels, and got to know how to implement them in OpenCV.

In addition, we also applied our newly gained knowledge to the practical example of pedestrian detection. For this, we had to learn about the HOG feature descriptor, and how to collect suitable data for the task. We used bootstrapping to improve the performance of our classifier and combined the classifier with OpenCV's multi-scale detection mechanism.

Not only was that a lot to digest in a single chapter, but you have also made it through half of the book. Congrats!

In the next chapter, we will shift gears a bit and revisit a topic from earlier chapters: spam filters. However, this time we want to build a much smarter...