Getting started with OpenCV

Being the avid user of OpenCV that I believe you are, I probably don't have to convince you about the power of OpenCV.

Built to provide a common infrastructure for computer vision applications, OpenCV has become a comprehensive set of both classic and state-of-the-art computer vision and machine learning algorithms. According to their own documentation, OpenCV has a user community of more than 47,000 people and has been downloaded over seven million times. That's pretty impressive! As an open-source project, it is very easy for researchers, businesses, and government bodies to utilize and modify already available code.

This being said, a number of open-source machine learning libraries have popped up since the recent machine learning boom that provide far more functionality than OpenCV. A prominent example is scikit-learn, which provides a number of state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms as well as a wealth of online tutorials and code snippets. As OpenCV was developed mainly to provide computer vision algorithms, its machine learning functionality is restricted to a single module, called ml. As we will see in this book, OpenCV still provides a number of state-of-the-art algorithms, but sometimes lacks a bit in functionality. In these rare cases, instead of reinventing the wheel, we will simply use scikit-learn for our purposes.

Last but not least, installing OpenCV using the Python Anaconda distribution is essentially a one-liner!