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OpenCV 5 Is Here: The Biggest Leap in Years for Computer Vision

opencv.org

11–20 of 160 posts

Re: OpenCV 5 Is Here: The Biggest Leap in Years for Computer Vision

#11

does this mean im actually able to try object detection in opencv now? i mean i know basic image processing techniques, and i know "in theory" how ML works but ive never really seen a case where i can just say "heres an image now detect all the apples". theres always 1. find a model that has the knowledge, 2. hook it up to an inference engine, 3. do something useful. i always get stuck at 1.

That seems to be the way things are going.

Large general models have taken over in NLP, and (outside of embedded/low latency applications) it seems like they are coming for CV next.

So you should soon be able to have large generic model that can detect whatever for you.

It's already pretty much possible with open-vocabulary detectors like SAM3, where you could just prompt it with "Apple": https://ai.meta.com/research/sam3/

Re: OpenCV 5 Is Here: The Biggest Leap in Years for Computer Vision

#12

does this mean im actually able to try object detection in opencv now? i mean i know basic image processing techniques, and i know "in theory" how ML works but ive never really seen a case where i can just say "heres an image now detect all the apples". theres always 1. find a model that has the knowledge, 2. hook it up to an inference engine, 3. do something useful. i always get stuck at 1.

YOLO has basically solved that for my use cases for a couple years now. If you want labels that are not in the pretrained labels it's also easy to fine-tune, provided you're willing to label 200 or so images

If you need something less restricted to existing labels (say wanting all the red apples, or all cardboard signs) SAM3 is great, as the sibling comment says

Re: OpenCV 5 Is Here: The Biggest Leap in Years for Computer Vision

#13
post #10

> One practical detail is worth knowing. The new engine is CPU-only at the moment, so if you select a non-CPU backend and target (for example CUDA or OpenVINO through setPreferableBackend and setPreferableTarget), you will want the classic engine. So there's room for even better performance!

It's certainly a choice to make your headline feature a new ONNX engine, feature a bunch of comparisons how it's better than ONNXRuntime, while casually mentioning on the side that the cool new much faster engine is CPU-only

Sure, running models on the CPU is very much a thing in computer vision (the benchmarked YOLOv8n has 37M params). But this whole announcement feels more like OpenCV catching up to the modern world, not "The Biggest Leap in Years for Computer Vision"

Still great, needing fewer libraries is a good thing, but maybe a bit oversold

Re: OpenCV 5 Is Here: The Biggest Leap in Years for Computer Vision

#14
post #2

When I use Codex/Claude to complete a computer vision task, such as extracting assets from an image, OpenCV is their default solution. However, I believe that using YOLO and other methods is outdated. The best solution now is to directly use Nano Banana or other AI image models. A paper has proven that image generation models can perform most CV tasks well. I believe the new OpenCV should become a wrapper for VLM or…

If I want to identify and measure the size of round things in my orange sorter machine, I shouldn't have to resort to an unnecessarily complicated solution just because some AI bros can't understand that not everything needs to be an AI model.

Like, the AI model tools already exist, all that would be accomplished if OpenCV pivoted would be to take it away for people who want to do low-level vision programming. It wouldn't add anything useful to the world, just destroy an excellent library.

Re: OpenCV 5 Is Here: The Biggest Leap in Years for Computer Vision

#15

does this mean im actually able to try object detection in opencv now? i mean i know basic image processing techniques, and i know "in theory" how ML works but ive never really seen a case where i can just say "heres an image now detect all the apples". theres always 1. find a model that has the knowledge, 2. hook it up to an inference engine, 3. do something useful. i always get stuck at 1.

moondream is a beast

Re: OpenCV 5 Is Here: The Biggest Leap in Years for Computer Vision

#16
post #2

When I use Codex/Claude to complete a computer vision task, such as extracting assets from an image, OpenCV is their default solution. However, I believe that using YOLO and other methods is outdated. The best solution now is to directly use Nano Banana or other AI image models. A paper has proven that image generation models can perform most CV tasks well. I believe the new OpenCV should become a wrapper for VLM or…

I can get great results from a YOLO model with 30M to maybe 300M params. To get decent CV from a LLM 8B params is the absolute minimum, closer to 30B for interesting tasks

I might be on board about LLMs being the future of OCR (though many would disagree), but for general CV they are very inefficient for very limited benefit

Re: OpenCV 5 Is Here: The Biggest Leap in Years for Computer Vision

#17
post #10

> One practical detail is worth knowing. The new engine is CPU-only at the moment, so if you select a non-CPU backend and target (for example CUDA or OpenVINO through setPreferableBackend and setPreferableTarget), you will want the classic engine. So there's room for even better performance!

No one uses ONNXRuntime (nor the new engine in OpenCV 5) in production. For anything performance-sensitive, one would run models under TensorRT, as an example.

Re: OpenCV 5 Is Here: The Biggest Leap in Years for Computer Vision

#18
post #2

When I use Codex/Claude to complete a computer vision task, such as extracting assets from an image, OpenCV is their default solution. However, I believe that using YOLO and other methods is outdated. The best solution now is to directly use Nano Banana or other AI image models. A paper has proven that image generation models can perform most CV tasks well. I believe the new OpenCV should become a wrapper for VLM or…

Great, let me know when those models can run on-server and process/analyze streams of ID images with less than 100ms of latency. You’ll need to make sure you have a massive set of training data including all manner of slightly blurred and slightly distorted ID cards

Re: OpenCV 5 Is Here: The Biggest Leap in Years for Computer Vision

#20
post #2

When I use Codex/Claude to complete a computer vision task, such as extracting assets from an image, OpenCV is their default solution. However, I believe that using YOLO and other methods is outdated. The best solution now is to directly use Nano Banana or other AI image models. A paper has proven that image generation models can perform most CV tasks well. I believe the new OpenCV should become a wrapper for VLM or…

I can get great results from a YOLO model with 30M to maybe 300M params. To get decent CV from a LLM 8B params is the absolute minimum, closer to 30B for interesting tasks I might be on board about LLMs being the future of OCR (though many would disagree), but for general CV they are very inefficient for very limited benefit

They can however be extremely useful for curating training data. Also things like SAM and the DINO (/grounding dino) models.

Also if they are better then you can also have a flow that’s cheap model -> marginal cases go to more complex thing (and a chain of these).

The yolo models are really shockingly good for their cost and how well they can work with not much training data as well.

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