Computer vision is a rapidly growing field, partly as a result of both cheaper and more capable cameras, partly because of affordable processing power, and partly because vision algorithms are starting to mature. OpenCV itself has played a role in the growth of [Computer vision] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_vision) by enabling thousands of people to do more productive work in vision. With its focus on real-time vision, OpenCV helps students and professionals efficiently implement projects and jump-start research by providing them with a computer vision and machine learning infrastructure that was previously available only in a few mature research labs.
There’s no problem with Matlab(R) but it takes much of the time and is not advisable to use for realtime applications like SixthSense project. So if you would have followed the procedure it will work but it will work slowly. Its because it interprets each statement of the whole code at the same time while we know in C/C++ it compiles first and then we could execute the whole program at once.
From that you all would have got that OpenCV works on C/C++ cross compilers. OpenCV is nothing but a collection of C/C++ libraries used for image processing algorithms as functions. For example we used imread command in Matlab® here also in OpenCV we have imread(); the arguments differ. Now as a plus point of good realtime speed we should have some difficulties too. The main drawback is its based on C/C++ or python so eventually it would be somewhat difficult to use and as it just includes libraries it has some problems with its installation too.
More introduction on OpenCV is given at the following web sites:
http://opencv.org Main Site
http://docs.opencv.org Documentation & tutorials
http://aishack.in Blog about OpenCV Tutorials & its installation in Windows
The following are the steps for installation of OpenCV on Ubuntu: (Tested on 12.04 64-bit but it should work perfectly on other ubuntu derivatives too)
Step 1: Download following Required packages. (Skip this step if your internet bandwidth is over 1-2 Mbps (Recommended to skip)):
- OpenCV Main Library For Linux (ofcourse): http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencvlibrary/files/opencv-unix/2.4.3/OpenCV-2.4.3.tar.bz2/download
- x264 (Download The Latest):ftp://ftp.videolan.org/pub/videolan/x264/snapshots/
- ffmpeg(latest): http://ffmpeg.org/releases/
- v4l: http://www.linuxtv.org/downloads/v4l-utils/
Step 2: After Downloading you need to install many other libraries so now I assume that you have downloaded this all files in the following folder
Step 3: Download The following Shell Script file and run it in terminal with the PWD as /home/$USER/Downloads/OpenCV
Shell Script : with downloaded library : http://db.tt/pgEuOKK2
Download at the run time : http://db.tt/U1r9FH7N (Recommended)
For execution just type sudo sh opencv*.sh
The script has been cloned from : https://github.com/jayrambhia/Install-OpenCV