Playing with Images

This chapter will teach you the basic elements of OpenCV and will show you how to accomplish the most fundamental image-processing tasks—reading, displaying, and saving images. However, before you can start with OpenCV, you need to install the library. This is a simple process that is explained in the first recipe of this chapter.

All your computer vision applications will involve the processing of images. This is why the most fundamental tool that OpenCV offers you is a data structure to handle images and matrices. It is a powerful data structure, with many useful attributes and methods. It also incorporates an advanced memory management model that greatly facilitates the development of applications. The last two recipes of this chapter will teach you how to use this important OpenCV data structure.

In this chapter, we will get you started with the OpenCV library. You will learn how to perform the following tasks:

• Installing the OpenCV library
• Loading, displaying, and saving images
• Exploring the cv::Mat data structure
• Defining regions of interest