OpenCV-Python is a library of Python bindings designed to solve computer vision problems.
Python is a general purpose programming language started by Guido van Rossum that became very popular very quickly, mainly because of its simplicity and code readability. It enables the programmer to express ideas in fewer lines of code without reducing readability.
Compared to languages like C/C++, Python is slower. That said, Python can be easily extended with C/C++, which allows us to write computationally intensive code in C/C++ and create Python wrappers that can be used as Python modules. This gives us two advantages: first, the code is as fast as the original C/C++ code (since it is the actual C++ code working in background) and second, it is easier to code in Python than C/C++. OpenCV-Python is a Python wrapper for the original OpenCV C++ implementation.
OpenCV-Python makes use of Numpy, which is a highly optimized library for numerical operations with a MATLAB-style syntax. All the OpenCV array structures are converted to and from Numpy arrays. This also makes it easier to integrate with other libraries that use Numpy such as SciPy and Matplotlib.
You can install OpenCV using pip. Open a terminal or command prompt and run:
pip install opencv-python
If you need additional modules (e.g., contrib modules), you can install opencv-contrib-python:
pip install opencv-contrib-python
After installation, you can verify that OpenCV is installed correctly by running the following Python code:
import cv2
print(cv2.__version__)
If the installation is successful, this will print the version of OpenCV installed.