Chapter 2. An Introduction to the Basics of OpenCV

After covering the installation of OpenCV on different operating systems in Chapter 1, Getting Started with OpenCV, we are going to introduce the basics of OpenCV development in this chapter.

In this chapter, you will learn how to create your project using CMake.

We will also introduce the image basic data structures, matrices, and other structures that are required in our projects.

We will learn how to save our variables and data in files using the XML/YAML persistence OpenCV functions.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Configuring projects with CMake
• Reading/writing images from/to disk
• Reading videos and accessing camera devices
• The main image structures (matrices)
• Other important and basic structures (vectors, scalars, and so on)
• An introduction to basic matrix operations
• File storage operations with the XML/YAML persistence OpenCV API