1.1. What Is OpenCV?

OpenCV [OpenCV] is an open source (see http://opensource.org) computer vision library available from http://SourceForge.net/projects/opencvlibrary. The library is written in C and C++ and runs under Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. There is active development on interfaces for Python, Ruby, Matlab, and other languages.

OpenCV was designed for computational efficiency and with a strong focus on real-time applications. OpenCV is written in optimized C and can take advantage of multicore processors. If you desire further automatic optimization on Intel architectures [Intel], you can buy Intel's Integrated Performance Primitives (IPP) libraries [IPP], which consist of low-level optimized routines in many different algorithmic areas. OpenCV automatically uses the appropriate IPP library at runtime if that library is installed.