Today, images and video are everywhere. Online photo sharing sites and social networks have them in the billions. Search engines will produce images of just about any conceivable query. Practically all phones and computers come with built in cameras.

It is not uncommon for people to have many gigabytes of photos and videos on their devices.

Programming a computer and designing algorithms for understanding what is in these images is the field of computer vision. Computer vision powers applications like image search, robot navigation, medical image analysis, photo management and many more.

The idea behind this book is to give an easily accessible entry point to hands-on computer vision with enough understanding of the underlying theory and algorithms to be a foundation for students, researchers and enthusiasts. The Python programming language, the language choice of this book, comes with many freely available powerful modules for handling images, mathematical computing and data mining