openCV intro

Generally when we think of image processing we think of a famous software "Matlab". Matlab has made coding easy for novice beginners even outside the world of image processing but many have a notion that Matlab is the only tool to be used.Matlab is a high level language for researchers and students to develop things with ease.Traditionally if a task had to be done (say simply reading an image) the level of C/C++ programming required would have to be huge thus limiting the field to those who could write efficient program. This is where Matlab was useful as it removed the base level programming(creating pointers, allocate memory reading the data) required and focused on the abstract layer programming(Theories to be developed). Matlab has its perks if you can optimize your code in matlab to execute it in shorter run time.Also if you have the finance to purchase the product. But I want inform that there are other tools which can be used instead of Matlab such as Octave, openCV, etc..
OpenCV is a very powerful open source library for image and video processing applications and can be used in any platform such as Windows, Linux, Android, iOS,Raspberry pi, etc...You can check out their website opencv. I will be sharing my experiences and tricks with openCV. Lets start with installation of openCV in both Windows and Linux.I will be following the Mat structure instead of IplImage structure as it is a bit easier to program.