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)

Understanding decision trees

A decision tree is simple yet powerful model for supervised learning problems. Like the name suggests, we can think of it as a tree in which information flows along different branches--starting at the trunk and going all the way to the individual leaves. If you are wondering if you have ever seen a decision tree before, let me remind you about the spam filter figure we encountered in Chapter 1, A Taste of Machine Learning:

Example of a simple spam filter--revisited

This is basically a decision tree!

A decision tree is made of a hierarchy of questions or tests about the data (also known as decision nodes) and their possible consequences. In the preceding example, we might count the number of words in each email using the CountVectorizer object from the previous chapter. Then it's easy to ask the first question (whether the email contains the words...