Chapter 6. Image Processing in OpenCV

It always starts with an unprocessed and raw image, taken with a smartphone, webcam, DSLR camera, or, in short, any device that is capable of shooting and recording image data. However, it usually ends with sharp or blurred; bright, dark, or balanced; black and white or colored; and many other different representations of the same image data. This is probably the initial step (and one of the most important steps) in computer vision algorithms, and it's usually referred to as Image Processing (for now, let's forget about the fact that, sometimes, computer vision and Image Processing are used interchangeably; this is a discussion for experts). Of course, you can have image processing in between or in the final phases of any computer vision process, but, in general, any photo or video recorded with most of the existing devices undergoes some kind of image processing algorithm before anything else. Some of these algorithms are just meant to convert the...