OpenCV Launching Kickstarter Campaign for New AI Courses

The non-profit organization behind the popular worldwide library of computer vision programming functions, OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision), is launching a kickstarter campaign to raise funds for a series of summer 2019 AI courses.

An overview of three courses was provided in an OpenCV email to Synced. They are Computer Vision I : Introduction; Computer Vision II : Applications; and Deep Learning with PyTorch.

The kickstarter campaign starts in May and anyone who pledges will be able to register for the courses at a discounted rate.

Originally developed by Intel in 1999, OpenCV has grown into to a well-recognized open source cross-platform library with two million downloads a week. It has built a collection of 2500 free and easy-to-use algorithms tailored for computer vision and vision processing applications such as facial recognition, mobile robotics, segmentation, augmented reality, etc.

Since 2012 the non-profit OpenCV.org foundation has been overseeing OpenCV, maintaining the website and library development. In 2016 San Francisco-based computer vision startup and major OpenCV contributor Itseez was acquired by Intel to enhance its IoT and automotive capability.

Last November OpenCV released the first stable version in its 4.0 line after a 3.5-year-wait. Major updates included high-performance computer vision development and deep learning inference, such as support for DNN (Deep Neural Network) modules and the ONNX (Open Neural Network Exchange) format.

“Our users come from all walks of life. We are engineers, programmers, application developers, students, researchers, entrepreneurs, social workers, and hobbyists. The common thread that connects us all is that we love solving real world problems using cutting edge technology,” OpenCV wrote in its email to Synced.

OpenCV and its primary interface are written in C++. OpenCV also provides bindings in Python, Java and MATLAB/OCTAVE. OpenCV is available on Windows, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD desktop operating systems, and Android, iOS, Maemo, and BlackBerry 10 mobile operating systems.

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Journalist: Tony Peng | Editor: Michael Sarazen