A brief introduction to OpenCV

The purpose of this paper is to introduce and quickly make a reader familiar with OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision) basics without having to go through the lengthy reference manuals and books. OpenCV is an open source library for image and video analysis, originally introduced more than decade ago by Intel. Since then, a number of programmers have contributed to the most recent library developments. The latest major change took place in 2009 (OpenCV 2) which includes main changes to the C++ interface. Nowadays the library has >2500 optimized algorithms. It is extensively used around the world, having >2.5M downloads and >40K people in the user group. Regardless of whether one is a novice C++ programmer or a professional software developer, unaware of OpenCV, the main library content should be interesting for the graduate students and researchers in image processing and computer vision areas. To master every library element it is necessary to consult many books available on the topic of OpenCV. However, reading such more comprehensive material should be easier after comprehending some basics about OpenCV from this paper.