What you need for this book

You don't need to have special knowledge in computer vision to read this book, but you should have good C/C++ programming skills and basic experience with OpenCV before reading this book. Readers without experience in OpenCV may wish to read the book Learning OpenCV for an introduction to the OpenCV features, or read OpenCV 2 Cookbook for examples on how to use OpenCV with recommended C/C++ patterns, because this book will show you how to solve real problems, assuming you are already familiar with the basics of OpenCV and C/C++ development.

In addition to C/C++ and OpenCV experience, you will also need a computer, and IDE of your choice (such as Visual Studio, XCode, Eclipse, or QtCreator, running on Windows, Mac, or Linux). Some chapters have further requirements, in particular:

• To develop an OpenCV program for Raspberry Pi, you will need the Raspberry Pi device, its tools, and basic Raspberry Pi development experience.
• To develop an iOS app, you will need an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch device, iOS development tools (including an Apple computer, XCode IDE, and an Apple Developer Certificate), and basic iOS and Objective-C development experience.
• Several desktop projects require a webcam connected to your computer. Any common USB webcam should suffice, but a webcam of at least 1 megapixel may be desirable.
• CMake is used in some projects, including OpenCV itself, to build across operating systems and compilers. A basic understanding of build systems is required, and knowledge of cross-platform building is recommended.

An understanding of linear algebra is expected, such as basic vector and matrix operations, and eigen decomposition.