Getting Started With OpenCV

[Eric Gregori] sent in an article he wrote for EETimes to introduce the concepts behind computer vision to the masses. As a nice little bonus, [Eric] included a VMware image containing Ubuntu and all the packages and examples necessary to write your own OpenCV apps.

There’s a ton of awesome stuff you can do with computer vision – from automated sentries to keep squirrels away, a kitchen that will tell you when to do the dishes, and automating blindness by mounting a laser on a face tracker, there’s a lot of unexplored territory in the area of computer vision.

Included in [Eric]’s VM image are a motion and line detection example app, an ‘optical flow’ example, and a face detection example. There’s enough here to make a few very interesting projects, so hopefully, [Eric]’s VM image and examples will get your next CV project up and running quickly.

15 thoughts on “Getting Started With OpenCV

  1. I spent several evenings getting OpenCV 2.4 + the videoInput lib working for x64 windows just to be able to enumerate the camera devices. I think a feature request has been issued.
    Coming up next: distortion correction and stitching.

      1. You can build it for x64 if you manage to obtain/build the dependencies for x64 (things have changed since the last version of videoInput I was able to find, the platform SDK is called “Windows SDK” and the DirectDraw stuff is now part of the DirectX SDK). In this case, the DirectDraw base classes needed rebuilding.
        Once all include and additional library paths are set properly, it works.
        There are other problems (you’ll have to exclude some standard libraries via additional commandline statements etc.) which I won’t go into detail here.

    1. The first dandelion “rescue” system I imagined resulted in smoking craters instead of yellow flowers. I think the flowers are preferable. XD

      Honestly, I’ve always been of the mind that large, weed-free, grass lawns are a waste of space, water and chemicals. Unless you have kids who need play space or animals to graze, and neither of those mind the occasional dandelion.

      Otherwise, it might as well be astroturf.

  2. Oh, very cool. Thanks for sharing.

    Have been wanting to play with OpenCV for a while now. Hopefully the VMware package will make it easier to get started.

    downloading now at a whopping ~50 kb/sec

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