Key FeaturesThis book provides hands-on examples that cover the major features that are part of any important Computer Vision applicationIt explores important algorithms that allow you to recognize faces, identify objects, extract features from images, help your system make meaningful predictions from visual data, and much moreAll the code examples in the book are based on OpenCV 3.1 – the latest versionBook DescriptionComputer vision and machine learning concepts are frequently used in practical computer vision based projects. If youre a novice, this book provides the steps to build and deploy an end-to-end application in the domain of computer vision using OpenCV/C++. At the outset, we explain how to install OpenCV and demonstrate how to run some simple programs. You will start with images (the building blocks of image processing applications), and see how they are stored and processed by OpenCV. Youll get comfortable with OpenCV-specific jargon (Mat Point, Scalar, and more), and get to know how to traverse images and perform basic pixel-wise operations. Building upon this, we introduce slightly more advanced image processing concepts such as filtering, thresholding, and edge detection. In the latter parts, the book touches upon more complex and ubiquitous concepts such as face detection (using Haar cascade classifiers), interest point detection algorithms, and feature descriptors. You will now begin to appreciate the true power of the library in how it reduces mathematically non-trivial algorithms to a single line of code!The concluding sections touch upon OpenCVs Machine Learning module. You will witness not only how OpenCV helps you pre-process and extract features from images that are relevant to the problems you are trying to solve, but also how to use Machine Learning algorithms that work on these features to make intelligent predictions from visual data!What you will learnExplore the steps involved in building a typical computer vision/machine learning applicationUnderstand the relevance of OpenCV at every stage of building an applicationHarness the vast amount of information that lies hidden in images into the apps you buildIncorporate visual information in your apps to create more appealing softwareGet acquainted with how large-scale and popular image editing apps such as Instagram work behind the scenes by getting a glimpse of how the image filters in apps can be recreated using simple operations in OpenCVAppreciate how difficult it is for a computer program to perform tasks that are trivial for human beingsGet to know how to develop applications that perform face detection, gender detection from facial images, and handwritten character (digit) recognitionAbout the AuthorSamyak Datta has a bachelors and a masters degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee. He is a computer vision and machine learning enthusiast. His first contact with OpenCV was in 2013 when he was working on his masters thesis, and since then, there has been no looking back. He has contributed to OpenCVs GitHub repository. Over the course of his undergraduate and masters degrees, Samyak has had the opportunity to engage with both the industry and research. He worked with Google India and Media.net (Directi) as a software engineering intern, where he was involved with projects ranging from machine learning and natural language processing to computer vision. As of 2016, he is working at the Center for Visual Information Technology (CVIT) at the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad.Table of ContentsLaying the FoundationImage FilteringImage ThresholdingImage HistogramsImage Derivatives and Edge DetectionFace Detection Using OpenCVAffine Transformations and Face AlignmentFeature Descriptors in OpenCVMachine Learning with OpenCVCommand-line Arguments in C++