OpenCV started as the brainchild of Gray Bradsky, once a computer vision engineer at Intel, around the early 2000s. Bradsky and a team of engineers, mostly from Russia, developed the first versions of OpenCV internally at Intel before making v0.9 of it open source software (OSS) in 2002. Bradsky then transitioned to Willow Garage, with the former founding members of OpenCV. Among them were Viktor Eurkhimov, Sergey Molinov, Alexander Shishkov, and Vadim Pisarevsky (who eventually started the company ItSeez, which was acquired in 2016 by Intel), who began supporting the young library as an open source project.
Version 0.9 had a predominantly C API and already sported image data manipulation functions and pixel access, image processing, filtering, colorspace transformations, geometric and shape analysis (for example, morphologic functions, Hough transforms...