The OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision Library) is a set of libraries and programs which may be used to rapidly accelerate experimentation and research in computer vision and related image and visual processing studies. The library may be installed and compiled on the Raspberry Pi in a few hours and provides a wealth of programs and subroutines to make image processing on the Pi easy.
The Pi Eye Project has used OpenCV for many different functions:
- Image transforms and projections
- Displaying images on the screen
- Object detection (e.g. face detection)
- Manipulation of visual arrays
- And more …
The main website for OpenCV is at opencv.org and there are many tutorials and examples on the web for its use.
From the OpenCV website : “OpenCV is released under a BSD license and hence it’s free for both academic and commercial use. It has C++, C, Python and Java interfaces and supports Windows, Linux, Mac OS, iOS and Android. OpenCV was designed for computational efficiency and with a strong focus on real-time applications. Written in optimized C/C++, the library can take advantage of multi-core processing. Enabled with OpenCL, it can take advantage of the hardware acceleration of the underlying heterogeneous compute platform.
Adopted all around the world, OpenCV has more than 47 thousand people of user community and estimated number of downloads exceeding 14 million. Usage ranges from interactive art, to mines inspection, stitching maps on the web or through advanced robotics.”
It’s recommended that you download and compile the latest version of OpenCV for your Pi. There are a number of tutorials and scripts which make this easy: