Sunday, June 20, 2010

Open CV Tutorial and Introduction

Introduction: -
For past few years I am using OpenCV for my image processing library. Initially I stared with Matlab. But the
as usual the programing in Matlab was easy but the execution was really slow. For my real time image processing project I stared to search for a good Image processing library and found OpenCv. It was not only fast but I can built exe files unlike m files in Matlab. I this tutorial along with a brief intorduction, we will a very simple OpenCV program.

You can download OpenCv library form :- http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencvlibrary/ Latest version is 2.1. You will also have to setup the workspace. You can find it  here. For DevC++ user the setup part is here.

Lets see some important features of OpenCV:-

  • Open source computer vision library in C/C++.
  • Optimized and intended for real-time applications.
  • OS/hardware/window-manager independent.
  • Generic image/video loading, saving, and acquisition.
  • Both low and high level API.
  • Provides interface to Intel's Integrated Performance
  • Primitives (IPP) with processor specific optimization (Intel processors).


OpenCV modules
There are mainly 4 modules in OpenCV. These are

  • cv - Main OpenCV functions.
  • cvaux - Auxiliary (experimental) OpenCV functions.
  • cxcore - Data structures and linear algebra support.
  • highgui - GUI functions.



Image data structure in OpenCV and a Sample Program:-
Now we have done enough reading, Lets try our hands at some programing. In this simple program we will load a image file and show in window. I assume you have sample image :- 
sample.bmp. 


#include "cv.h" //main OpenCV functions
#include "highgui.h" //OpenCV GUI functions¯include <stdio.h> so no need to re include it.
int main()
{
       /* declare a new IplImage pointer, the basic
          image data structure in OpenCV */
          IplImage* newImg;
        /* load an image named "sample.bmp", 1 means
           this is a color image */
            newImg = cvLoadImage("sample.bmp",1);
         //create a new window
             cvNamedWindow("Window", 1);
          //display the image in the window
             cvShowImage("Window", newImg);
             //wait for key to close the window
            cvWaitKey(0);
            cvDestroyWindow( "Window" ); //destroy the window
            cvReleaseImage( &newImg ); //release the memory for the image
    return 0;
}

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