[Andrew Schreiber]

I can walk you through the process I used to get started with OpenCV, or at least the steps I used.


Step 1: Compile a sample program - This may seem trivial but do it. It makes sure your environment is set up right.

Step 2: Load a static image and display it - Again, simple, but you'd be surprised at just how important small successes are in programming.

Step 3: Run a simple filter on your static image(I'm partial to threshold by a color) and display the result. - Not only does it get you an understanding of how to process images but you're going to do a lot of this anyway.

Step 4: Convert between different color spaces. Typical you have an RGB image, you should convert to HSV. Even if you don't need to it's good to know how to.

Step 5: Start writing your filter to find the desired feature. Typically this is a series of steps to isolate the feature. Ours was a simple threshold by and hue range this year.

Step 6: Extract Filter - For this I typically use the various contour functions.

Step 7: Filter your contours - maybe you got a light, maybe there's multiple targets. This isn't really vision just simple data cleaning.

Step 8: Interface with robot - ??? This is the hard part.