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)

Compressing color spaces using k-means

One exciting application of k-means is the compression of image color spaces. For example, a typical true-color image comes with a 24-bit color depth, allowing for a total of 16,777,216 color variations. However, in most images, a large number of the colors will be unused, and many of the pixels in the image will have similar or identical colors.

Alternatively, we can use k-means to reduce the color palette to, for example, 16 color variations. The trick here is to think of the cluster centers as the reduced color palette. Then k-means will automatically organize the millions of colors in the original image into the appropriate number of colors!

Visualizing the true-color palette

Let...