Learning OpenCV 3

Chapter 23. Future of OpenCV

Past and Present

OpenCV was launched in August 1999 at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference (and so turns 17 years old at the publication of this book). Gary Bradski founded OpenCV at Intel with the intention to accelerate both the research and use of real applications of computer vision in society. Few things in life go according to their original plan, but OpenCV is one of those few. As of this writing, OpenCV has nearly 3,000 functions, has had 14 million downloads, is trending well above 200,000 downloads per month, and is used daily in millions of cell phones, recognizing bar codes, stitching panoramas together, and improving images through computational photography. OpenCV is at work in robotics systems—picking lettuce, recognizing items on conveyor belts, helping self-driving cars see, flying quad-rotors, doing tracking and mapping in virtual and augmented reality systems, helping unload trucks and pallets in distribution centers, and more—and is built into the Robotics Operating System (ROS). It is used in applications that promote mine safety, prevent swimming pool drownings, process Google Maps and streetview imagery, and implement Google X robotics, to name a few examples.

Since the previous edition of this book, OpenCV has been re-architected from C to modern, modular C++ compatible with STL and Boost. The library has been brought up to modern software development standards with distributed development on Git, continuous ...