Book Image

OpenCV 3 Blueprints

By : Joseph Howse, Puttemans, Sinha
Book Image

OpenCV 3 Blueprints

By: Joseph Howse, Puttemans, Sinha

Overview of this book

Computer vision is becoming accessible to a large audience of software developers who can leverage mature libraries such as OpenCV. However, as they move beyond their first experiments in computer vision, developers may struggle to ensure that their solutions are sufficiently well optimized, well trained, robust, and adaptive in real-world conditions. With sufficient knowledge of OpenCV, these developers will have enough confidence to go about creating projects in the field of computer vision. This book will help you tackle increasingly challenging computer vision problems that you may face in your careers. It makes use of OpenCV 3 to work around some interesting projects. Inside these pages, you will find practical and innovative approaches that are battle-tested in the authors’ industry experience and research. Each chapter covers the theory and practice of multiple complementary approaches so that you will be able to choose wisely in your future projects. You will also gain insights into the architecture and algorithms that underpin OpenCV’s functionality. We begin by taking a critical look at inputs in order to decide which kinds of light, cameras, lenses, and image formats are best suited to a given purpose. We proceed to consider the finer aspects of computational photography as we build an automated camera to assist nature photographers. You will gain a deep understanding of some of the most widely applicable and reliable techniques in object detection, feature selection, tracking, and even biometric recognition. We will also build Android projects in which we explore the complexities of camera motion: first in panoramic image stitching and then in video stabilization. By the end of the book, you will have a much richer understanding of imaging, motion, machine learning, and the architecture of computer vision libraries and applications!
Table of Contents (9 chapters)
8
Index

Rounding up the unusual suspects

This chapter's demo applications are tested with three cameras, which are described in the following table. The demos are also compatible with many additional cameras; we will discuss compatibility later as part of each demo's detailed description. The three chosen cameras differ greatly in terms of price and features but each one can do things that an ordinary webcam cannot!

Name

Price

Purposes

Modes

Optics

Sony PlayStation Eye

$10

Passive, color imaging in visible light

640x480 @ 60 FPS

320x240 @ 187 FPS

FOV: 75 degrees or 56 degrees (two zoom settings)

ASUS Xtion PRO Live

$230

Passive, color imaging in visible light

Active, monochrome imaging in NIR light

Depth estimation

Color or NIR: 1280x1024 @ 60 FPS

Depth: 640x480 @ 30 FPS

FOV: 70 degrees

PGR Grasshopper 3 GS3-U3-23S6M-C

$1000

Passive, monochrome imaging in visible light

1920x1200 @ 162 FPS

C-mount lens (not included)

Note

For examples of lenses that we can use with the GS3-U3-23S6M-C camera, refer to the Shopping for glass section, later in this chapter.

We will try to push these cameras to the limits of their capabilities. Using multiple libraries, we will write applications to access unusual capture modes and to process frames so rapidly that the input remains the bottleneck. To borrow a term from the automobile designers who made 1950s muscle cars, we might say that we want to "supercharge" our systems; we want to supply them with specialized or excess input to see what they can do!