Dalal - Instant OpenCV starter: get started with OpenCV using practical, hands-on projects

Jayneil Dalal is an Embedded Linux Engineer/Technical Writer who loves to explore different open source technologies, and he has been a key member of the PandaBoard.org and Beagleboard.org projects at Texas Instruments. He has been selected to give a talk at Linuxfest Northwest 2013 and OSCON 2013. He has previously presented at Linuxcon North America 2012, Drodicon 2012 in Berlin, Southeast Linuxfest 2012, Indiana Linuxfest 2012, Northwest Linuxfest 2012, Scipy 2011, and Opensource bridge 2012. Jayneil can be reached at <>.

I would like to thank my family members, Harish, Atul, Deena, and Nayshil, for encouraging me to write this book. Finally, I would like to acknowledge my co-author Sohil Patel's immense hardwork and dedication that made this book a reality.

Sohil Patel is a Computer Vision Engineer and FOSS advocate who loves to explore different open source technologies. His areas of interest include Python, Computer Vision, Augmented Reality, Linux, HCI, Pandaboard, and other open source hardware platforms. He is currently working at Azoi, which is a startup based in India.

I would like to thank my family members, Sanjay, Hema, and Hetvi, for encouraging me to write this book.

David Milln Escriv was 8 years old when he wrote his first program on an 8086 PC with Basic language, which enabled the 2D plotting of basic equations. This was only the beginning of his computer development relationship, and he has since created many applications and games.

In 2005, he finished his studies in IT through the Universitat Politcnica de Valencia with honors in human-computer interaction supported by computer vision with OpenCV (v0.96). He wrote a final project based on this subject and published it on HCI Spanish congress.

He also participated in Blender source code, an open source 3D-software project, and worked in his first commercial movie, Plumiferos Aventuras Voladoras, as a Computer Graphics Software Developer.

David now has more than 10 years of experience in IT, with more than 7 years experience in computer vision, computer graphics, and pattern recognition working on different projects and startups and applying his knowledge of computer vision, optical character recognition, and Augmented Reality.

He is the author of DamilesBlog (http://blog.damiles.com), where he publishes research articles and tutorials about OpenCV, computer vision in general, and Optical Character Recognition algorithms. He is also the co-author of Mastering OpenCV with Practical Computer Vision Projects . He has also reviewed the following Packt books:

I thank my wife, Izaskun, and my daughter, Eider, for their patience and support. Love you.

Sagar Patel is pursuing a Bachelors degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Nirma University, India. His main areas of interest include Digital Sound Processing, Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Vision. His research is on the bionics based project The Third Eye, which has been approved by Idea Lab. As far as physics is concerned, he loves to explore the idea of the Theory of Relativity . He believes that, "Thousands of miles of long journey begin with a single step, and that step begins with a tiny thought".

I am thankful to the authors, Jayneil Dalal and Sohil Patel, for giving me the opportunity to review this book. I would like to specially thank my parents and my grandfather for giving me the motivation. I am also thankful to Packt Publishing for providing the direction to the reviewing process.