Book Image

OpenCV Computer Vision Application Programming Cookbook Second Edition

By : Robert Laganiere
Book Image

OpenCV Computer Vision Application Programming Cookbook Second Edition

By: Robert Laganiere

Overview of this book

OpenCV 3 Computer Vision Application Programming Cookbook is appropriate for novice C++ programmers who want to learn how to use the OpenCV library to build computer vision applications. It is also suitable for professional software developers wishing to be introduced to the concepts of computer vision programming. It can also be used as a companion book in a university-level computer vision courses. It constitutes an excellent reference for graduate students and researchers in image processing and computer vision.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
12
Index

Detecting image contours with the Canny operator


In the previous chapter, we learned how it is possible to detect the edges of an image. In particular, we showed you that by applying a threshold on the gradient magnitude, a binary map of the main edges of an image can be obtained. Edges carry important visual information since they delineate the image elements. For this reason, they can be used, for example, in object recognition. However, simple binary edge maps suffer from two main drawbacks. First, the edges that are detected are unnecessarily thick; this makes the object's limit more difficult to identify. Second, and more importantly, it is often impossible to find a threshold that is sufficiently low in order to detect all important edges of an image and is, at the same time, sufficiently high in order to not include too many insignificant edges. This is a trade-off problem that the Canny algorithm tries to solve.

How to do it...

The Canny algorithm is implemented in OpenCV by the ...