What is required?
This is the most obvious question after what was said in the introduction of this chapter, but the answer for it is also the first step in our journey to learn Computer Vision. This book is intended for developers who are familiar with C++ programming language and want to develop powerful and good-looking computer vision applications that perform well on different operating systems without much effort. This book aims to take you on an exciting journey through different topics of Computer Vision with a focus on hands-on exercises and developing whatever you learn, one step at a time.
Anyone with enough C++ experience knows that it's not an easy task to write visually rich applications using raw C++ code and depending on OS-specific APIs. So, almost every C++ developer (or at least serious developers with an active career in C++), use one or another framework to ease the process. Among the most widely known frameworks for C++ comes Qt. It is, in fact, one of the top choices, if not the top choice for that matter. On the other hand, if your aim is to develop an application dealing with images or visualized datasets, the OpenCV Framework is perhaps the first (and perhaps the most popular) address to visit. So, that's why this book focuses on the combination of Qt and OpenCV. Developing Computer Vision applications for different desktop and mobile platforms that perform with the highest possible performance would not be possible without using a combination of powerful frameworks such as Qt and OpenCV.
To summarize what was said, make sure you have at least an intermediate level of knowledge in C++ programming language. If terms such as class, abstract class, inheritance, templates, or pointers sound unfamiliar to you, then consider reading a book on C++ first. For all the rest of the topics, especially all of the hands-on topics that are covered, this book promises you crystal clear explanations (or reference to specific documentation pages) for all of the examples and tutorials included. Of course, to get a very detailed and deep understanding of how modules and classes are implemented in Qt and OpenCV, you need to be familiar with many more resources, studies, sometimes even hard-core mathematical calculations or low-level understanding of how a computer or operating system performs in the real world, which is totally out of the scope of this book. However, for all the algorithms and methods covered in this book, you will get a brief description of what they are, how and when and where they are used, and enough guidelines to let you continue digging deeper if you feel like it.
