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)

Dealing with data using OpenCV and Python

Although raw data can come from a variety of sources and in a wide range of formats, it will help us to think of all data fundamentally as arrays of numbers. For example, images can be thought of as simply 2D arrays of numbers representing pixel brightness across an area. Sound clips can be thought of 1D arrays of intensity over time. For this reason, efficient storage and manipulation of numerical arrays is absolutely fundamental to machine learning.

If you have mostly been using OpenCV's C++ application programming interface (API) and plan on continuing to do so, you might find that dealing with data in C++ can be a bit of a pain. Not only will you have to deal with the syntactic overhead of the C++ language, but you will also have to wrestle with different data types and cross-platform compatibility issues.

This process is radically...