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;

}