So 2013 has been a pretty busy year. Contracting has been going incredibly well and I've had a chance to work on some really cool stuff. Jumping back into C++ after 2 years away from it was quite fun, although it reminded me how tedious and annoying C++ can be, especially when trying to do small things. Unfortunately being so busy also meant I neglected this blog for most of the year.
My most recent contracting project is pretty interesting and gave me a chance to learn some new things. One of my more recent tasks was creating a high-speed image processing tool, which lead me to learn about using the OpenCV library for image processing tasks. There are some pros and cons to using it, however the pros definitely outweigh the downsides. OpenCV has a huge amount of functionality built-in for image processing, and the API to use it is quite easy to use. One of the simplest, yet most powerful, methods I found in the library was imread() which handles reading an image file and loading the pixel data into an object.
There are some gotchas when using OpenCV, one that tripped me up initially was how it stores pixel data. All game engines I've worked with handle color data as RGB channels, OpenCV uses BGR channels (the Red and Blue channels are switched). This ended up biting me for a little while during the first round of testing when the tool flagged red images as blue ones.
I should also mention OpenCV assumes you have some level of knowledge of image processing techniques, and is mainly there to provide implementations of those techniques. Coming into it with little knowledge of the subject like I did will be difficult, expect to do a lot of research to play catch-up for what they talk about.
On a final note, if you're new to OpenCV, I highly recommend checking out these excellent lessons http://opencv-srf.blogspot.com/p/opencv-c-tutorials.html. They provide a great starting point for navigating the OpenCV library and some terrific examples of image filtering operations.
