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2 Chapter 1 ■ Practical Aspects of a Vision System

new versions will require little or no modification to the vision programs that
depend on it. Such an API is the OpenCV system.

1.1 OpenCV

OpenCV was originally developed by Intel. At the time of this writing,
version 2.0 is current and can be downloaded from http://sourceforge
.net/projects/opencvlibrary/.
However, Version 2.0 is relatively new, yet it does not install and compile
with all of the major systems and compilers. All the examples in this book use
Version 1.1 from http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencvlibrary/files
/opencv-win/1.1pre1/OpenCV_1.1pre1a.exe/download,and compile with the
Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition, which can be downloaded from
www.microsoft.com/express/Downloads/#2008-Visual-CPP.
The Algorithms for Image Processing and Computer Vision website
(www.wiley.com/go/jrparker) will maintain current links to new versions of
these tools. The website shows how to install both the compiler and OpenCV.
The advantage of using this combination of tools is that they are still pretty
current, they work, and they are free.

1.2 The Basic OpenCV Code

OpenCV is a library of C functions that implement both infrastructure oper-
ations and image-processing and vision functions. Developers can, of course,
add their own functions into the mix. Thus, any of the code described here
can be invoked from a program that uses the OpenCV paradigm, meaning
that the methods of this book are available in addition to those of OpenCV.
One simply needs to know how to call the library, and what the basic data
structures of open CV are.
OpenCV is a large and complex library. To assist everyone in starting to use
it, the following is a basic program that can be modified to do almost anything
that anyone would want:

// basic.c : A `wrapper´ for basic vision programs.
#include ˝ stdafx.h˝
#include ˝ cv.h˝
#include ˝ highgui.h˝
int main (int argc, char* argv[])
{
IplImage *image = 0;