About the Authors

Joseph Howse lives in Canada. During the cold winters, he grows a beard and his four cats grow thick coats of fur. He combs the cats every day. Sometimes, the cats pull his beard.

Joseph has been writing for Packt Publishing since 2012. His books include OpenCV for Secret Agents, OpenCV 3 Blueprints, Android Application Programming with OpenCV 3, Learning OpenCV 3 Computer Vision with Python, and Python Game Programming by Example.

When he is not writing books or grooming cats, Joseph provides consulting, training, and software development services through his company, Nummist Media (http://nummist.com).

I dedicate my work to Sam, Jan, Bob, Bunny, and the cats, who have been my lifelong guides and companions.

To my coauthors, I extend my sincere thanks for the opportunity to research and write OpenCV 3 Blueprints together. Authoring a book is a lot of work, and your dedication has made this project possible!

I am also indebted to the many editors and technical reviewers who have contributed to planning, polishing, and marketing this book. These people have guided me with their experience and have saved me from sundry errors and omissions. From the project's beginnings, Harsha Bharwani and Merwyn D'souza have been instrumental in assembling and managing the team of authors, editors, and reviewers. Harsha has advised me through multiple book projects, and I am grateful for her continued support.

Finally, I want to thank my readers and everybody else at Packt and in the OpenCV community. We have done so much together, and our journey continues!

Steven Puttemans is a PhD research candidate at the KU Leuven, Department of Industrial Engineering Sciences. At this university, he is working for the EAVISE research group, which focuses on combining computer vision and artificial intelligence. He obtained a master of science degree in Electronics-ICT and further expanded his interest in computer vision by obtaining a master of science in artificial intelligence.

As an enthusiastic researcher, his goal is to combine state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms with real-life industrial problems to provide robust and complete object detection solutions for the industry. His previous projects include TOBCAT, an open source object detection framework for industrial object detection problems, and a variety of smaller computer vision-based industrial projects. During these projects, Steven worked closely with the industry.

Steven is also an active participant in the OpenCV community. He is a moderator of the OpenCV Q&A forum, and has submitted or reviewed many bug fixes and improvements for OpenCV 3. He also focuses on putting as much of his research as possible back into the framework to further support the open source spirit.

More info about Steven's research, projects, and interests can be found at https://stevenputtemans.github.io.

Firstly, I would like to thank my girlfriend and family for supporting me through the long journey of writing my first computer vision-based book. They stood by me at every step of the way. Secondly, I would like to thank the OpenCV Q&A community who have been supporting me with all the technical problems that arose while writing this book.

Quan Hua is a software engineer at Autonomous, a start-up company in robotics, where he focuses on developing computer vision and machine learning applications for personal robots. He earned a bachelor of science degree from the University of Science, Vietnam, specializing in computer vision, and published a research paper in CISIM 2014. As the owner of Quan404.com, he also blogs about various computer vision techniques to share his experience with the community.

I wish to thank everyone who has encouraged me on the way while writing this book.

I want to express my sincere gratitude to my coauthors, editors, and reviewers for their advice and assistance. Thank you, Neha Bhatnagar, Harsha Bharwani, and Merwyn D'souza for giving me a golden opportunity to join this project.

I would like to thank the members of my family and my girlfriend, Kim Ngoc, who supported and encouraged me in spite of all the time it took me away from them. They all kept me going, and this book would not have been possible without them.

I would also like to thank my teachers who gave me the knowledge in computer vision and machine learning.

Utkarsh Sinha lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he is pursuing a master's in computer vision at Carnegie Mellon University. He intends to learn the state of the art of computer vision at the university and work on real-life industrial scale computer vision challenges.

Before joining CMU, he worked as a Technical Director at Dreamworks Animation on movies such as Home, How to Train your Dragon 2, and Madagascar 3. His work spans multiple movies and multiple generations of graphics technology.

He earned his bachelor of engineering degree in computer science and his master of science degree in mathematics from BITS-Pilani, Goa. He has been working in the field of computer vision for about 6 years as a consultant and as a software engineer at start-ups.

He blogs at http://utkarshsinha.com/ about various topics in technology—most of which revolve around computer vision. He also publishes computer vision tutorials on the Internet through his website, AI Shack (http://aishack.in/). His articles help people understand concepts in computer vision every day.

I would like to thank my parents for supporting me through the long journey of writing my first book on computer vision. Without them, this book wouldn't have been possible.

I am indebted to the technical reviewers and editors who have helped polish the book to be what it is now. Their efforts have really brought the book together—thinking of aspects such as planning and marketing. Harsha Bharwani and Merwyn D'souza have been linchpins in this project—managing the team of authors, editors, and reviewers. I am grateful to them for providing me with such an excellent opportunity.

My friends, teachers, and the computer vision community have helped me understand computer vision and have supported me by answering questions, and having good debates and discussions. This has been vital, and I would like to acknowledge and thank everyone for the efforts they put in.

I would also like to express my gratitude to the Packt community and OpenCV users. Computer vision is a very exciting place to be right now—and we're just getting started!