The approach followed in this book is particularly suited for readers who are already knowledgeable in computer vision (or can learn the discipline elsewhere) and want to start developing applications rapidly. Each chapter provides several examples of the key available functions for the most important stages in a vision system. The book is, therefore, focused on providing the reader with a working example as soon as possible so that he/she can develop additional features on top of that.

To use this book, only free software is needed. All the examples have been developed and tested with the freely available Qt IDE. The freely available CUDA toolkit is required for the GPU acceleration examples in Chapter 8, Advanced Topics.