Introduction to Computer Vision and OpenCV

Computer vision is a field that includes methods for acquiring, processing, analyzing, and understanding images and, in general, high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical or symbolic information - "Wikipedia"

OpenCV (Open-source Computer Vision) is the compact package of modern computer vision. There are more hardcore software's other than OpenCV such as MATLAB,LABVIEW etc. But OpenCV is made specially for computer vision or another word image processing.It has a wide range of modules that can help you with a lot of computer vision problems.

Build in modules of OpenCV

• Core ----Core data structures, data types, and memory management
• Highgui---- GUI, reading and writing images and video
• Imgproc---- Image filtering, geometric image transformations, structure, and shape       analysis.
• Video---- Motion analysis and object tracking in video.
• Calib3d---- Camera calibration and 3D reconstruction from multiple views.
• Objdetect---- Object detection using cascade and histogram-of-gradient classifiers.
• ML---- Statistical models and classification algorithms for use in computer vision applications.
• etc..

Setting up OpenCV on Windows operating system

OpenCV installation instructions for windows users are available at http://docs.opencv.org/doc/tutorials/introduction/windows_install/windows_install.html