Even though Intel Galileo is a headless device without any video output support or graphical processor unit, you can get video streams to Intel Galileo. In order to work with video cameras, either a USB webcam or a network camera, we will need the OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision) library. If you work with an USB camera, you will also need the required Linux kernel modules (v4l2) to recognize video devices connected to Intel Galileo from the USB port.

Before getting into the details of OpenCV API and internals, we will build the OpenCV library and v4l2 module for Intel Galileo and make it ready for development with OpenCV. If you have not built OpenCV, you can follow the instructions given in the following section.