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)

Detecting Pedestrians with Support Vector Machines

In the previous chapter, we talked about how to use decision trees for classification and regression. In this chapter, we want to direct our attention to another well established supervised learner in the machine learning world: support vector machines (SVMs).

Soon after their introduction in the early 1990, SVMs quickly became popular in the machine learning community, largely because of their success in early handwritten digit classification. They remain relevant to this day, especially in application domains, such as computer vision.

The goal of this chapter is to apply SVMs to a popular problem in computer vision: pedestrian detection. In contrast to a recognition task (where we name the category of an object), the goal of a detection task is to say whether a particular object (or in our case, a pedestrian) is present in an...