Joseph Howse - OpenCV for Secret Agents

Karan Kedar Balkar has been working as an independent Android application developer since the past 4 years. Born and brought up in Mumbai, he holds a bachelor's degree in computer engineering. He has written over 50 programming tutorials on his personal blog (http://karanbalkar.com) that covers popular technologies and frameworks.

At present, he is working as a software engineer. He has been trained on various technologies, including Java, Oracle, and .NET. Apart from being passionate about technology, he loves to write poems and travel to different places. He likes listening to music and enjoys playing the guitar.

First, I would like to thank my parents for their constant support and encouragement. I would also like to thank my friends, Srivatsan Iyer, Ajit Pillai, and Prasaanth Neelakandan, for always inspiring and motivating me.

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Packt Publishing for giving me a chance to be a part of the reviewing process.

Michael Beyeler is a PhD student in the department of computer science at the University of California, Irvine, where he is working on large-scale cortical models of biological vision, motion, learning, and memory, as well as their implementation on GPGPUs and their applications for cognitive robotics. He received a bachelor's of science degree in electrical engineering and information technology in 2009 as well as a master's of science degree in biomedical engineering in 2011 from ETH Zurich, Switzerland.

Demetris Gerogiannis received his bachelor's of science, master's of science, and PhD degrees from the department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Ioannina, Greece in 2004, 2007, and 2014, respectively. He is an active researcher of computer vision, and his research interests include image segmentation and registration, point set registration, feature extraction, pattern recognition, and autonomous navigation. His work has been presented in international conferences, and it has been published in international journals. He is an IEEE student member, and from October 2012 till June 2013, he was the interim chair at the IEEE student branch of the University of Ioannina. Since his early years in the university, he was interested in entrepreneurship. He was involved in several entrepreneurial technological ventures, and he has participated in several international business competitions. The most important one was the participation at the Startupbootcamp for NFC & Contactless, communication selection days, in Amsterdam in September 2013. His start-up was selected among 250 plus international start-ups that had applied for this accelerator project. He is also involved in the development of his local region start-up ecosystem. To that end, he has cofounded in 2014 a nonprofit team (StartupLake) with a view to provide mentorship to young ambitious people who want to have their own start-ups.

Ryohei Tanaka is a software engineer at Yahoo! Japan Corporation. His focus is now on machine learning, information extraction, and distributed computing. He has sound knowledge of image processing on web browser (HTML5/JavaScript). More details on his programming skills, interests, and experience about computer vision can be found at http://rest-term.com.