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.

Comments

  1. Bob says:

    Good guide. For thoese less skilled at coding in C or C++, there is “SimpleCV” too, or Matlab, which are compared here:

    http://blog.fixational.com/post/19177752599/opencv-vs-matlab

  2. hboy007 says:

    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.

    • Jarel says:

      Wait. VideoInput is now 64-bit? Since when?

      • hboy007 says:

        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.

  3. rue_mohr says:

    sweet, something to get me started on a system to find and recover = ‘rescue’ Dandelion heads from my lawn.

    • andar_b says:

      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.

      • Tekgno says:

        The “recover = ‘rescue'” part makes it sound like a desire to collect them such as for making dandelion wine.

  4. Dave says:

    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

  5. stu says:

    It would be nice to have a similar image with the point cloud library as well (http://pointclouds.org/). Setting up all those dependancies is a real pain.

  6. Zee says:

    Does anyone have a torrent version of that virtual machine? The download speed is terrible

  7. zgembo says:

    -Hello Jerry!
    -Hello Newman!

  8. xorpunk says:

    nice 30 year old algo..

    Maybe I should get into the marketing aspects of focused engineering and physics too

  9. Zee says:

    I created a torrent file of for quicker downloading: http://pastebin.com/wA5gtAVk There’s a magnet link in there

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