An Introduction to the Basics of OpenCV

After covering OpenCV installation on different operating systems in Chapter 1, Getting Started with OpenCV, we are going to introduce the basics of OpenCV development in this chapter. It begins with showing how to create our project using CMake. We are going to introduce the basic image data structures and matrices, along with other structures that are required to work in our projects. We are going to introduce how to save our variables and data into files using the XML/YAML persistence OpenCV functions.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Configuring projects with CMake
• Reading/writing images from/to disk
• Reading videos and accessing camera devices
• The main image structures (for example, matrices)
• Other important and basic structures (for example, vectors and scalars)
• An introduction to basic matrix operations
• File storage operations with XML/YAML persistence OpenCV API