Officially launched in 1999 the OpenCV project was initially an Intel Research initiative to advance CPU-intensive applications, part of a series of projects including real-time ray tracing and 3D display walls. The main contributors to the project included a number of optimization experts in Intel Russia, as well as Intel's Performance Library Team. In the early days of OpenCV, the goals of the project were described as:
Disseminate vision knowledge by providing a common infrastructure that developers could build on, so that code would be more readily readable and transferable.
Advance vision-based commercial applications by making portable, performance-optimized code available for free – with a license that did not require code to be open or free itself.
The first alpha version of OpenCV was released to the public at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in 2000, and five betas were released between 2001 and 2005. The first 1.0 version was released in 2006. A version 1.1 "pre-release" was released in October 2008. The second major release of the OpenCV was in October 2009. OpenCV 2 includes major changes to the C++ interface, aiming at easier, more type-safe patterns, new functions, and better implementations for existing ones in terms of performance. Official releases now occur every six months and development is now done by an independent Russian team supported by commercial corporations. In August 2012, support for OpenCV was taken over by a non-profit foundation OpenCV.org, which maintains a developer and user site. On May 2016, Intel signed an agreement to acquire Itseez, a leading developer of OpenCV. In July 2020, OpenCV announced and began a Kickstarter campaign for the , a series of hardware modules and additions to OpenCV supporting Spatial AI.
OpenCV is written in C++ and its primary interface is in C++, but it still retains a less comprehensive though extensive older C interface. All of the new developments and algorithms appear in the C++ interface. There are bindings in Python, Java and MATLAB/OCTAVE. The API for these interfaces can be found in the online documentation. Wrappers in several programming languages have been developed to encourage adoption by a wider audience. Since version 3.4, OpenCV.js is a JavaScript binding for selected subset of OpenCV functions for the web platform.
Hardware acceleration
If the library finds Intel's Integrated Performance Primitives on the system, it will use these proprietary optimized routines to accelerate itself. A CUDA-based GPU interface has been in progress since September 2010. An OpenCL-based GPU interface has been in progress since October 2012, documentation for version 2.4.13.3 can be found at docs.opencv.org.
