Glossary of Key Terms
Glossary of Key Terms
| Term | Definition |
| Adaptive Thresholding | A method of thresholding where the threshold value is calculated for smaller regions of an image, resulting in different thresholds for different areas. |
| Affine Translation | A geometric transformation performed on an image using the warpAffine() method to shift, scale, or rotate its contents. |
| Bilateral Filter | An image filtering operation that smooths an image while preserving edges by considering both the spatial distance and the intensity difference between pixels. |
| Blur (Averaging) | An operation that reduces image noise by convolving the image with a normalized box filter, where each pixel is replaced by the average of its neighbors. |
| Box Filter | An operation similar to averaging blur that applies a filter to an image; the user can specify whether the box should be normalized. |
| Canny Edge Detection | A multi-stage algorithm used to detect a wide range of edges in an image, taking a grayscale image as input. |
| CascadeClassifier | A class from the org.opencv.objdetect package used to load a classifier file (e.g., lbpcascade_frontalface.xml) for object detection tasks. |
| Computer Vision | A discipline that explains how to reconstruct, interpret, and understand a 3D scene from its 2D images, essentially modeling and replicating human vision. |
| Dilation | A morphological operation that increases the size of bright regions in an image. It computes the maximum pixel value under a kernel and replaces the anchor point with that value. |
| Distance Transformation | An operator that takes a binary image and changes the gray level intensities of foreground points to their respective distances from the closest boundary (0 value). |
| Erosion | A morphological operation that increases the size of dark regions in an image. It computes the minimum pixel value under a kernel and replaces the anchor point with that value. |
| Gaussian Blur | An operation that reduces high-frequency components by convolving an image with a Gaussian filter instead of a box filter. |
| Header (Mat Class) | A component of the Mat class that contains metadata about the image matrix, such as its size, storage method, and memory address. It is constant in size. |
| Highgui Module | An OpenCV module that provides an easy-to-use interface with simple UI capabilities. In the Java library, its features are found in org.opencv.imgcodecs and org.opencv.videoio. |
| Histogram Equalization | A technique that improves the contrast of an image by stretching out the intensity range of its pixels. |
| Hough Line Transform | A technique used to detect straight lines in an image. The HoughLines() method is used to implement this transformation. |
| Image Processing | A field that focuses on image manipulation, specifically performing image-to-image transformations where both the input and output are images. |
| Imgcodecs Class | A class in the org.opencv.imgcodecs package that provides methods for reading images from files (imread()) and writing images to files (imwrite()). |
| Imgproc Class | A class in the org.opencv.imgproc package that contains a wide range of methods for image processing, including color conversion, blurring, filtering, drawing, and morphological operations. |
| Laplacian Transformation | A derivative operation that uses a second-order derivative mask to find edges in an image, classifying them as inward or outward edges. |
| Mat Class | The fundamental OpenCV class for storing image data. It represents an n-dimensional array and consists of a header and a pointer to the pixel data. |
| Median Blur | An image smoothing operation where the central pixel in a kernel area is replaced by the median value of all pixels in that area, which is effective at removing noise while preserving edges. |
| Morphological Operations | A set of operations that process images based on their shapes to remove noise and other imperfections. Dilation and erosion are the two main types. |
| OpenCV | A cross-platform library for developing real-time computer vision applications, focusing on image processing, video capture, and object detection. |
| Pattern Recognition | A field that develops techniques to classify patterns, which significantly overlaps with Computer Vision. |
| Photogrammetry | A field concerned with obtaining accurate measurements from images, which overlaps with Computer Vision. |
| Pointer (Mat Class) | A component of the Mat class that stores the actual pixel values of the image. Its size can vary depending on the image. |
| Pyramid (Image Pyramids) | An operation where an image is repeatedly smoothed and then subsampled to decrease its resolution while increasing its smoothness. |
| Scharr Operator | An operator used to detect the second derivatives of an image in horizontal and vertical directions, similar to the Sobel operator. |
| Simple Thresholding | A method of image segmentation that uses a single, global threshold value to create a binary image from a grayscale one. |
| Sobel Operator | An operator used to detect edges in an image by calculating the image gradient in the horizontal and vertical directions. |
| VideoCapture | A class from the org.opencv.videoio package that provides methods to capture video frames using a system camera. |