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)

What you need for this book

You will need a computer, Python Anaconda, and enthusiasm. Lots of enthusiasm. Why Python?, you may ask. The answer is simple: it has become the de facto language of data science, thanks to its great number of open source libraries and tools to process and interact with data.

One of these tools is the Python Anaconda distribution, which provides all the scientific computing libraries we could possibly ask for, such as NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, Scikit-Learn, and Pandas. In addition, installing OpenCV is essentially a one-liner. No more flipping switches in cc make or compiling from scratch! We will talk about how to install Python Anaconda in Chapter 1, A Taste of Machine Learning.

If you have mostly been using OpenCV in combination with C++, that's fine. But, at least for the purpose of this book, I would strongly suggest that you switch to Python. C++ is fine when your task is to develop high-performance code or real-time applications. But when it comes to picking up a new skill, I believe Python to be a fundamentally better choice of language, because you can do more by typing less. Rather than getting annoyed by the syntactic subtleties of C++, or wasting hours trying to convert data from one format into another, Python will help you concentrate on the topic at hand: to become an expert in machine learning.