Emami Shervin Levgen Khvedchenia - Mastering Open CV with practical computer vision projects: step-by-step tutorials to solve common real-world computer vision problems for desktop or mobile, from augmented reality and number plate

Daniel Llis Baggio started his work in computer vision through medical image processing at InCor (Instituto do Corao Heart Institute) in So Paulo, where he worked with intra-vascular ultrasound image segmentation. Since then, he has focused on GPGPU and ported the segmentation algorithm to work with NVIDIA's CUDA. He has also dived into six degrees of freedom head tracking with a natural user interface group through a project called ehci (http://code.google.com/p/ehci/). He now works for the Brazilian Air Force.

I'd like to thank God for the opportunity of working with computer vision. I try to understand the wonderful algorithms He has created for us to see. I also thank my family, and especially my wife, for all their support throughout the development of the book. I'd like to dedicate this book to my son Stefano.

Shervin Emami (born in Iran) taught himself electronics and hobby robotics during his early teens in Australia. While building his first robot at the age of 15, he learned how RAM and CPUs work. He was so amazed by the concept that he soon designed and built a whole Z80 motherboard to control his robot, and wrote all the software purely in binary machine code using two push buttons for 0s and 1s. After learning that computers can be programmed in much easier ways such as assembly language and even high-level compilers, Shervin became hooked to computer programming and has been programming desktops, robots, and smartphones nearly every day since then. During his late teens he created Draw3D (http://draw3d.shervinemami.info/), a 3D modeler with 30,000 lines of optimized C and assembly code that rendered 3D graphics faster than all the commercial alternatives of the time; but he lost interest in graphics programming when 3D hardware acceleration became available.

In University, Shervin took a subject on computer vision and became highly interested in it; so for his first thesis in 2003 he created a real-time face detection program based on Eigenfaces, using OpenCV (beta 3) for camera input. For his master's thesis in 2005 he created a visual navigation system for several mobile robots using OpenCV (v0.96). From 2008, he worked as a freelance Computer Vision Developer in Abu Dhabi and Philippines, using OpenCV for a large number of short-term commercial projects that included:

OpenCV was putting food on the table for Shervin's family, so he began giving back to OpenCV through regular advice on the forums and by posting free OpenCV tutorials on his website (http://www.shervinemami.info/openCV.html). In 2011, he contacted the owners of other free OpenCV websites to write this book. He also began working on computer vision optimization for mobile devices at NVIDIA, working closely with the official OpenCV developers to produce an optimized version of OpenCV for Android. In 2012, he also joined the Khronos OpenVL committee for standardizing the hardware acceleration of computer vision for mobile devices, on which OpenCV will be based in the future.

I thank my wife Gay and my baby Luna for enduring the stress while I juggled my time between this book, working fulltime, and raising a family. I also thank the developers of OpenCV, who worked hard for many years to provide a high-quality product for free.

David Milln Escriv was eight years old when he wrote his first program on an 8086 PC with Basic language, which enabled the 2D plotting of basic equations. 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 had a final project based on this subject and published it on HCI Spanish congress. He participated in Blender, 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 experience in computer vision, computer graphics, and pattern recognition, working on different projects and startups, applying his knowledge of computer vision, optical character recognition, and augmented reality. He is the author of the "DamilesBlog" (http://blog.damiles.com), where he publishes research articles and tutorials about OpenCV, computer vision in general, and Optical Character Recognition algorithms.

David has reviewed the book gnuPlot Cookbook by Lee Phillips and published by