What Is OpenCV? Opencv [OpenCV] is an open source see

2 | Chapter 1: Overview
use of camera calibration and image stitching techniques. Some are aware of niche applications
in safety monitoring, unmanned fl ying vehicles, or biomedical analysis. But
few are aware how pervasive machine vision has become in manufacturing: virtually
everything that is mass-produced has been automatically inspected at some point using
computer vision.
Th e open source license for OpenCV has been structured such that you can build a
commercial product using all or part of OpenCV. You are under no obligation to opensource
your product or to return improvements to the public domain, though we hope
you will. In part because of these liberal licensing terms, there is a large user community
that includes people from major companies (IBM, Microsoft , Intel, SONY, Siemens,
and Google, to name only a few) and research centers (such as Stanford, MIT, CMU,
Cambridge, and INRIA). Th ere is a Yahoo groups forum where users can post questions
and discussion at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OpenCV; it has about 20,000 members.
OpenCV is popular around the world, with large user communities in China, Japan,
Russia, Europe, and Israel.
Since its alpha release in January 1999, OpenCV has been used in many applications,
products, and research eff orts. Th ese applications include stitching images together in
satellite and web maps, image scan alignment, medical image noise reduction, object
analysis, security and intrusion detection systems, automatic monitoring and safety systems,
manufacturing inspection systems, camera calibration, military applications, and
unmanned aerial, ground, and underwater vehicles. It has even been used in sound and
music recognition, where vision recognition techniques are applied to sound spectrogram
images. OpenCV was a key part of the vision system in the robot from Stanford,
“Stanley”, which won the $2M DARPA Grand Challenge desert robot race [Th run06].