Book Image

Learning OpenCV 5 Computer Vision with Python, Fourth Edition - Fourth Edition

By : Joseph Howse, Joe Minichino
5 (2)
Book Image

Learning OpenCV 5 Computer Vision with Python, Fourth Edition - Fourth Edition

5 (2)
By: Joseph Howse, Joe Minichino

Overview of this book

Computer vision is a rapidly evolving science in the field of artificial intelligence, encompassing diverse use cases and techniques. This book will not only help those who are getting started with computer vision but also experts in the domain. You'll be able to put theory into practice by building apps with OpenCV 5 and Python 3. You'll start by setting up OpenCV 5 with Python 3 on various platforms. Next, you'll learn how to perform basic operations such as reading, writing, manipulating, and displaying images, videos, and camera feeds. From taking you through image processing, video analysis, depth estimation, and segmentation, to helping you gain practice by building a GUI app, this book ensures you'll have opportunities for hands-on activities. You'll tackle two popular challenges: face detection and face recognition. You'll also learn about object classification and machine learning, which will enable you to create and use object detectors and even track moving objects in real time. Later, you'll develop your skills in augmented reality and real-world 3D navigation. Finally, you'll cover ANNs and DNNs, learning how to develop apps for recognizing handwritten digits and classifying a person's gender and age, and you'll deploy your solutions to the Cloud. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills you need to execute real-world computer vision projects.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Learning OpenCV 5 Computer Vision with Python, Fourth Edition: Tackle tools, techniques, and algorithms for computer vision and machine learning
Appendix A: Bending Color Space with the Curves Filter

Edge detection with Canny

OpenCV offers a handy function called Canny (after the algorithm's inventor, John F. Canny), which is very popular not only because of its effectiveness, but also because of the simplicity of its implementation in an OpenCV program since it is a one-liner:

import cv2
import numpy as np
img = cv2.imread("../images/statue_small.jpg", 0)
cv2.imwrite("canny.jpg", cv2.Canny(img, 200, 300))  # Canny in one line!
cv2.imshow("canny", cv2.imread("canny.jpg"))
cv2.waitKey()
cv2.destroyAllWindows()

The result is a very clear identification of the edges:

Figure 3.3: Results of applying Canny edge detection.

The Canny edge detection algorithm is complex but also quite interesting. It is a five-step process:

  1. Denoise the image with a Gaussian filter.
  2. Calculate the gradients.
  3. Apply non-maximum suppression (NMS) on the edges. Basically, this means that the algorithm selects the best edges from a set of overlapping edges. We&apos...