Michael Beyeler - OpenCV with Python Blueprints

Michael Beyeler is a PhD candidate in the department of computer science at the University of California, Irvine, where he is working on computational models of the brain as well as their integration into autonomous brain-inspired robots. His work on vision-based navigation, learning, and cognition has been presented at IEEE conferences and published in international journals. Currently, he is one of the main developers of CARLsim, an open source GPGPU spiking neural network simulator.

This is his first technical book that, in contrast to his (or any) dissertation, might actually be read.

Michael has professional programming experience in Python, C/C++, CUDA, MATLAB, and Android. Born and raised in Switzerland, he received a BSc degree in electrical engineering and information technology, as well as a MSc degree in biomedical engineering from ETH Zurich. When he is not "nerding out" on robots, he can be found on top of a snowy mountain, in front of a live band, or behind the piano.

I would like to thank Packt Publishing for this great opportunity and their support, my girlfriend for putting up with my late-night writing sessions, as well as the technical reviewers, who have spotted (hopefully) all my glaring errors and helped make this book a success.

Jia-Shen Boon is a researcher in robotics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, supervised by Professor Michael Coen. He is a proud son of the sunny city-state of Singapore. Before coming to Wisconsin, he was a research engineer at DSO National Labs, where he worked on autonomous underwater vehicles and other unspeakable things. During his free time, Jia-Shen likes to study the Japanese language and write about himself in the third person.

Florian LE BOURDAIS hails from France and Germany. While he was growing up in the lazy south of France, an encounter with music from The Beatles gave him an early grasp of the English language. One of his earliest childhood memories has him watching his older German cousin, Dominik, coding a Tetris clone in the family basement using QBasic. High school and the advent of hand-held calculators led him to write his first Snake program using the TI-Basic language. After having acquired a solid background in mathematics and physics, Florian was admitted to one of the top French engineering schools. He studied mechanical engineering, but interned as an index-arbitrage trader in Japan during the financial crisis. Keen to come back to a country he much liked, he specialized in nuclear engineering and was doing an internship in a Japanese fast-breeder reactor during the Fukushima nuclear crisis.

Coming back to France, Florian was happy to start an engineering job in non-destructive testing. He specializes in ultrasound inspection methods, with a focus on phased array transducers, guided waves, and EMATs. He has published more than 10 international conference proceedings. At night, he's a hacker who likes to play with 3D printers, fermented Korean cabbage, the Raspberry Pi, Japanese characters, and guitars. He regularly writes a blog about his side projects at http://flothesof.github.io.

I would like to thank my friends and family for supporting me throughout this project. Special thanks goes to my favorite machine learning specialists at the Geeks d'Orlans, as well as Coloc du 1000.

Rahul Kavi is a PhD student at West Virginia University. He holds a master's degree in computer science. He is pursuing a PhD in the area of distributed machine learning and computer vision. He is a computer vision and robotics enthusiast. Rahul has worked on developing prototypes, optimizing computer vision, and machine learning applications for desktops, mobile devices, and autonomous robots. He writes blogs on his research interests and part-time projects at www.developerstation.org. He is a source code contributor to OpenCV.

Vipul Sharma is an engineering undergraduate from Jabalpur Engineering College. He is an ardent Python enthusiast and was one of the students selected for Google Summer of Code 2015 under the Python Software Foundation. He has been actively involved in Python and OpenCV since 2012. A few of his projects on OpenCV include a motion sensing surveillance camera, hand-gesture recognition, and solving a Rubik's cube by reading images of its faces in real time. Vipul loves contributing to open source software and is currently working on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) using OpenCV. You can check out his projects at https://github.com/vipul-sharma20.

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