To get the most out of this book

All of our code use Python 3.8, which is available on a variety of operating systems, such as Windows, GNU Linux, macOS, and others. We have made an effort to use only libraries that are available on these three operating systems. We will go over the exact versions of each of the dependencies we have used, which can be installed using pip (Python's dependency management system). If you have trouble getting any of these working, we have Dockerfiles available with which we have tested all the code in this book, which we cover in Appendix B, Setting Up a Docker Container.

Here is a list of dependencies that we have used, with the chapters they were used in:

          
Software required
           Version           Chapter number           Download links to the software
   
          
Python           3.8           All           https://www.python.org/downloads/
   
          
OpenCV           4.2           All           https://opencv.org/releases/
    
          
NumPy           1.18.1           All           http://www.scipy.org/scipylib/download.html
      
         
wxPython                       
          4.0           1, 4, 8           http://www.wxpython.org/download.php

          
matplotlib            3.1           4, 5, 6, 7           http://matplotlib.org/downloads.html

 
         
 SciPy             1.4           1, 10            http://www.scipy.org/scipylib/download.html

          
rawpy            
          0.14           5            https://pypi.org/project/rawpy/
    
        
ExifRead           2.1.2           5           https://pypi.org/project/ExifRead/

        
TensorFlow           2.0           7, 9           https://www.tensorflow.org/install
  
  

In order to run the codes, you will need a regular laptop or Personal Computer (PC). Some chapters require a webcam, which can be either an embedded laptop camera or an external one. Chapter 2, Hand Gesture Recognition Using a Kinect Depth Sensor also requires a depth sensor that can be either a Microsoft 3D Kinect sensor or any other sensor, which is supported either by the libfreenect library or OpenCV, such as ASUS Xtion.

We have tested this using Python 3.8 and Python 3.7, on Ubuntu 18.04.

If you already have Python on your computer, you can just get going with running the following on your terminal:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Here, requirements.txt is provided in the GitHub repository of the project, and has the following contents (which is the previously given table in a text file):

wxPython==4.0.5
numpy==1.18.1
scipy==1.4.1
matplotlib==3.1.2
requests==2.22.0
opencv-contrib-python==4.2.0.32
opencv-python==4.2.0.32
rawpy==0.14.0
ExifRead==2.1.2
tensorflow==2.0.1

Alternatively, you can follow the instructions in Appendix B, Setting Up a Docker Container, to get everything working with a Docker container.