OpenCV Tutorial | OpenCV using Python

OpenCV tutorial provides basic and advanced concepts of OpenCV. Our OpenCV tutorial is designed for beginners and professionals.

OpenCV is an open-source library for the computer vision. It provides the facility to the machine to recognize the faces or objects. In this tutorial we will learn the concept of OpenCV using the Python programming language.

Our OpenCV tutorial includes all topics of Read and Save Image, Canny Edge Detection, Template matching, Blob Detection, Contour, Mouse Event, Gaussian blur and so on.

What is OpenCV?

OpenCV is a Python open-source library, which is used for computer vision in Artificial intelligence, Machine Learning, face recognition, etc.

In OpenCV, the CV is an abbreviation form of a computer vision, which is defined as a field of study that helps computers to understand the content of the digital images such as photographs and videos.

The purpose of computer vision is to understand the content of the images. It extracts the description from the pictures, which may be an object, a text description, and three-dimension model, and so on. For example, cars can be facilitated with computer vision, which will be able to identify and different objects around the road, such as traffic lights, pedestrians, traffic signs, and so on, and acts accordingly.

Computer vision allows the computer to perform the same kind of tasks as humans with the same efficiency. There are a two main task which are defined below:

• Object Classification – In the object classification, we train a model on a dataset of particular objects, and the model classifies new objects as belonging to one or more of your training categories.
• Object Identification – In the object identification, our model will identify a particular instance of an object – for example, parsing two faces in an image and tagging one as Virat Kohli and other one as Rohit Sharma.

History

OpenCV stands for Open Source Computer Vision Library, which is widely used for image recognition or identification. It was officially launched in 1999 by Intel. It was written in C/C++ in the early stage, but now it is commonly used in Python for the computer vision as well.

The first alpha version of OpenCV was released for the common use at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in 2000, and between 2001 and 2005, five betas were released. The first 1.0 version was released in 2006.

The second version of the OpenCV was released in October 2009 with the significant changes. The second version contains a major change to the C++ interface, aiming at easier, more type-safe, pattern, and better implementations. Currently, the development is done by an independent Russian team and releases its newer version in every six months.

How OpenCV Works

In this tutorial, we will learn how computers perform image recognition.

How does computer recognize the image?

Human eyes provide lots of information based on what they see. Machines are facilitated with seeing everything, convert the vision into numbers and store in the memory. Here the question arises how computer convert images into numbers. So the answer is that the pixel value is used to convert images into numbers. A pixel is the smallest unit of a digital image or graphics that can be displayed and represented on a digital display device.

The picture intensity at the particular location is represented by the numbers. In the above image, we have shown the pixel values for a grayscale image consist of only one value, the intensity of the black color at that location.

There are two common ways to identify the images:

1. Grayscale

Grayscale images are those images which contain only two colors black and white. The contrast measurement of intensity is black treated as the weakest intensity, and white as the strongest intensity. When we use the grayscale image, the computer assigns each pixel value based on its level of darkness.

2. RGB

An RGB is a combination of the red, green, blue color which together makes a new color. The computer retrieves that value from each pixel and puts the results in an array to be interpreted.

Why OpenCV is used for Computer Vision?

• OpenCV is available for free of cost.
• Since the OpenCV library is written in C/C++, so it is quit fast. Now it can be used with Python.
• It require less RAM to usage, it maybe of 60-70 MB.
• Computer Vision is portable as OpenCV and can run on any device that can run on C.

Prerequisite

Before learning OpenCV, you must have the basic knowledge of Python programming language.

Audience

Our OpenCV tutorial is designed to help beginners and professionals.

Problem

We assure that you will not find any problem in this OpenCV tutorial. But if there is any mistake, please post the problem in contact form.