Book Image

OpenCV 3.x with Python By Example - Second Edition

By : Gabriel Garrido Calvo, Prateek Joshi
Book Image

OpenCV 3.x with Python By Example - Second Edition

By: Gabriel Garrido Calvo, Prateek Joshi

Overview of this book

Computer vision is found everywhere in modern technology. OpenCV for Python enables us to run computer vision algorithms in real time. With the advent of powerful machines, we have more processing power to work with. Using this technology, we can seamlessly integrate our computer vision applications into the cloud. Focusing on OpenCV 3.x and Python 3.6, this book will walk you through all the building blocks needed to build amazing computer vision applications with ease. We start off by manipulating images using simple filtering and geometric transformations. We then discuss affine and projective transformations and see how we can use them to apply cool advanced manipulations to your photos like resizing them while keeping the content intact or smoothly removing undesired elements. We will then cover techniques of object tracking, body part recognition, and object recognition using advanced techniques of machine learning such as artificial neural network. 3D reconstruction and augmented reality techniques are also included. The book covers popular OpenCV libraries with the help of examples. This book is a practical tutorial that covers various examples at different levels, teaching you about the different functions of OpenCV and their actual implementation. By the end of this book, you will have acquired the skills to use OpenCV and Python to develop real-world computer vision applications.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Contributors
Packt Upsell
Preface

Why do we care about seam carving?


Before we start our discussion about seam carving, we need to understand why it is needed in the first place. Why should we care about the image content? Why can't we just resize the given image and move on with our lives? Well, to answer those questions, let's consider the following image:

Now, let's say we want to reduce the width of this image while keeping the height constant. If we do that, it will look something like this:

As you can see, the ducks in the image look skewed, and there's degradation in the overall quality of the image. Intuitively speaking, we can say that the ducks are the interesting parts in the image. So, when we resize it, we want the ducks to be intact. This is where seam carving comes into the picture. Using seam carving, we can detect these interesting regions and make sure they don't get degraded.