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Learning OpenCV: Computer Vision with the OpenCV Library [Paperback]

Gary Bradski , Adrian Kaehler
4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)

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Book Description

October 1, 2008 0596516134 978-0596516130 1st

"This library is useful for practitioners, and is an excellent tool for those entering the field: it is a set of computer vision algorithms that work as advertised."
-William T. Freeman, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Learning OpenCV puts you in the middle of the rapidly expanding field of computer vision. Written by the creators of the free open source OpenCV library, this book introduces you to computer vision and demonstrates how you can quickly build applications that enable computers to "see" and make decisions based on that data.

Computer vision is everywhere-in security systems, manufacturing inspection systems, medical image analysis, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, and more. It stitches Google maps and Google Earth together, checks the pixels on LCD screens, and makes sure the stitches in your shirt are sewn properly. OpenCV provides an easy-to-use computer vision framework and a comprehensive library with more than 500 functions that can run vision code in real time.

Learning OpenCV will teach any developer or hobbyist to use the framework quickly with the help of hands-on exercises in each chapter. This book includes:

  • A thorough introduction to OpenCV
  • Getting input from cameras
  • Transforming images
  • Segmenting images and shape matching
  • Pattern recognition, including face detection
  • Tracking and motion in 2 and 3 dimensions
  • 3D reconstruction from stereo vision
  • Machine learning algorithms

Getting machines to see is a challenging but entertaining goal. Whether you want to build simple or sophisticated vision applications, Learning OpenCV is the book you need to get started.


Frequently Bought Together

Learning OpenCV: Computer Vision with the OpenCV Library + OpenCV 2 Computer Vision Application Programming Cookbook + Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications (Texts in Computer Science)
Price for all three: $152.32

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Product Details

  • Paperback: 555 pages
  • Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (October 1, 2008)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0596516134
  • ISBN-13: 978-0596516130
  • Product Dimensions: 7 x 1.2 x 9.1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #183,583 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Dr. Gary Rost Bradski is a consulting professor in the CS department at Stanford University AI Lab where he mentors robotics, machine learning and computer vision research. He is also Senior Scientist at Willow Garage http://www.willowgarage.com, a recently founded robotics research institute/incubator. He has a BS degree in EECS from U.C. Berkeley and a PhD from Boston University. He has 20 years of industrial experience applying machine learning and computer vision spanning option trading operations at First Union National Bank, to computer vision at Intel Research to machine learning in Intel Manufacturing and several startup companies in between. Gary started the Open Source Computer Vision Library (OpenCV http://sourceforge.net/projects/​opencvlibrary/ ), the statistical Machine Learning Library (MLL comes with OpenCV), and the Probabilistic Network Library (PNL). OpenCV is used around the world in research, government and commercially. The vision libraries helped develop a notable part of the commercial Intel performance primitives library (IPP http://tinyurl.com/36ua5s). Gary also organized the vision team for Stanley, the Stanford robot that won the DARPA Grand Challenge autonomous race across the desert for a $2M team prize and helped found the Stanford AI Robotics project at Stanford http://www.cs.stanford.edu/group/stair/ working with Professor Andrew Ng. Gary has over 50 publications and 13 issued patents with 18 pending. He lives in Palo Alto with his wife and 3 daughters and bikes road or mountains as much as he can.

Dr. Adrian Kaehler is a senior scientist at Applied Minds Corporation. His current research includes topics in machine learning, statistical modeling, computer vision and robotics. Adrian received his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Columbia university in 1998. Adrian has since held positions at Intel Corporation and the Stanford University AI Lab, and was a member of the winning Stanley race team in the DARPA Grand Challenge. He has a variety of published papers and patents in physics, electrical engineering, computer science, and robotics.


Product Details

  • Paperback: 555 pages
  • Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (October 1, 2008)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0596516134
  • ISBN-13: 978-0596516130
  • Product Dimensions: 7 x 1.2 x 9.1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #183,583 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

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Customer Reviews

At last a practical, pragmatic, accessible book on computer vision (and more!) Jean-Yves Bouguet  |  8 reviewers made a similar statement
The book is very well written, with very nice examples and explanations. JN  |  3 reviewers made a similar statement
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
50 of 50 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars A great guide to OpenCV with plenty of context October 30, 2008
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This book is excellent at exposing the reader to the various methods available in OpenCV and showing via code examples how to use each one. The author also gives you the website where you can look at the actual source code of each method shown. This is helpful since, for example, if you want to know exactly how the code is going about calculating the Fundamental Matrix, it is difficult to determine this by reading the book alone.

This book would be most useful to someone who already has a fundamental understanding of computer vision and image processing and wants to see how OpenCV will make their programming tasks easier. It does this by coding up well known algorithms into reliable pieces of code that you can use to accomplish more complex tasks. Do not come to this book if you are seeking to learn computer vision. You will only be confused as the author does not offer enough detail to teach you the mathematical foundations. However, I don't think that was his intention at all. Instead it is part user manual, part basic computer vision tutorial and overview, and part idea book. Each chapter is supplemented with excellent and interesting programming exercises that test your knowledge of what has been presented in a practical setting.

For a good basic understanding of computer vision try Computer Vision. To understand the algorithmic underpinnings of 3D computer vision try Introductory Techniques for 3-D Computer Vision. However, before you read either of these you must read com/Digital-Image-Processing-3rd-Edition/dp/013168728X">Digital Image Processing (3rd Edition), since image processing concepts are fundamental to understanding computer vision tasks. In fact, the two disciplines overlap in many spots. The sad truth of the matter is that no one book will teach you what you need to know to be an effective image scientist. However, this book on OpenCV is essential reading on applying the theory via programming in an effective manner. Highly recommended.
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48 of 50 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars Lacking the C++ API November 18, 2010
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I really love OpenCV. I bought this book and read about 50% of it before starting a project. Initially I found some code on the internet that looked like OpenCV code but was lacking pointers and casts. I learned that this clean code is actually C++ code with heavy use of templates in OpenCV 2.0. Sadly the book is based on OpenCV 1.0, so very little of the code in the book is useable.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars An absolute must have!!! October 20, 2008
Format:Paperback
At last a practical, pragmatic, accessible book on computer vision (and more!) providing step by step guidance on fundamental computational vision topics, with algorithmic explanation (just what is needed!), and concrete example code snippets. This book is now opening the door to the fabulous world of computational vision to anyone. It gives immediate access to a vast collection of image processing, and machine learning functions, all open source!
The book also includes many references and pointers to other material (such as technical papers), allowing the reader to learn more about any topic covered.
This is a great reference book, that won't just sit on your self.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars Aimed for Computer Vision Researchers December 17, 2010
Format:Paperback
This is a great book on the library. Although it's rather old and lacks the new C++ API (which, to me, is very similar to the MATLAB image processing toolkit), it provides a rather detailed explanation on the inner workings of the library as well as the math and research papers that backs it up.

If you are just a CV hobbyist, and just want to create some computer vision app with a webcam and don't care about the math, there's tons of resource online on how to use the library effectively.

I give the book four stars instead of five because I wish it would give more programming examples that it does. And sometimes the language is a little hard to understand, I'd usually have to read it several times to grasp the concepts in the book.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars Great Toolkit, Excruciating Read July 31, 2010
By Renner
Format:Paperback
The OpenCV library is great and it is nice that somebody put together a book to document it, because the documentation on the opencv wiki is as good as it could be and not well organized. The shortcoming of this book is the extreme verbosity. It is almost excruciating to read because you cannot just skip to the important points because many important points are buried enormous paragraphs that are mostly fluff. The two stars that I give it are entirely for my appreciation of the subject matter.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
As a computer instructor and researcher in biometrics and pattern recognition, I welcome this treatise on OpenCV.
Don't even consider opening the pages unless you are familiar with C, its use of structs, pointers, callback functions and the like. You may also be put off by the various mathematical discussions of various advanced computer vision algorithms that have been developed over the last two decades.
OpenCV is an open-source collaborative work. It's partially supported by the Intel corporation, through their quest for advanced algorithms that might be included in its computer chips. Many low-level tools needed for video and image processing are now provided in advanced Intel microprocessors.
The theme of OpenCV is audacious, yet achievable -- that of providing high-quality, high-performance software tools for the many computer vision algorithms that have been published over the years. That has largely been achieved through the clever use of low-level pointer-based tools, accompanied by complete C source code for everything down to the raw processor instructions.
Other good news is that the system provides an easy portal to advanced Intel hardware support, boosting performance to the highest possible level. One can also port OpenCV-based code to Linux, other Unix and Mac platforms -- it is not restricted to Windows.
I've had some trouble with Windows XP, but the image and camera grabbing functions work well under Windows Vista. I've also been able to exploit the OpenCV tools under Windows MFC to support Windows-based applications.
This O'Reilly book provides the background support that you will need to download the OpenCV system from the internet, configure your development environment and start exploring the magic that its tools can provide.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars Good for programmers just learning imaging
OpenCV is a wonderful imaging and matrix API. The presentation is very strong, with some good photos and examples. Read more
Published 1 month ago by James D. Cook
2.0 out of 5 stars Doesn't match current version of OpenCV
The programming examples in the book no longer work. Many of the OpenCV procedures now require additional parameters to be specified. The book needs to be updated.
Published 3 months ago by R. Feretich
4.0 out of 5 stars An exellent book
This is a fantastic book that contains a lot of basic information that I really need for the work I do. Read more
Published on May 17, 2011 by Odd Sock
2.0 out of 5 stars Out of date and deficient in several areas
Warning: The 2008 1st ed of this book is out of date in several areas (install paths listed in the book vs the actual default install paths, lib references, ch 2 has 1 paragraph... Read more
Published on March 12, 2011 by Lawrence Smith
5.0 out of 5 stars A Very Readable Guide
A surprisingly readable guide to using OpenCV, it explains the details required to use the library and provides a nice introduction to image processing and and machine vision.
Published on October 22, 2010 by Emily Sarah
4.0 out of 5 stars Great Introduction to a rather difficult library
I use OpenCV quite frequently and the first place I turn to whenever I'm going to try something new in OpenCV is this manual. Read more
Published on September 30, 2010 by beefinit
5.0 out of 5 stars Definitive book for OpenCV
This is absolutely the definitive and authoritative book on OpenCV. Don't know if there any competitive offerings, but this one is pretty darned good. Read more
Published on September 16, 2010 by Shashi Kant
3.0 out of 5 stars Great book, not an excellent library
I've purchased this book to learn OPenCV and gain understanding of theory behind computer vision techniques. Read more
Published on May 20, 2010 by A. Nagy
4.0 out of 5 stars Great Book
The OpenCV library provides an amazing opportunity to those interested
in computer vision to begin exploring the field. Read more
Published on January 5, 2010 by Andrei Mouravski
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