Over the years I have worked with several open source projects, but now seems to be the time when Open Source has matured and can really provide a great working environment and great products. It seems to me that the advances in the Open Source communities are beginning to out pace the efforts of individual companies. Today at home I use Ubuntu exclusively although I admit that like some forgotten curiosity I do have a virtual machine with Windows. Dont get me wrong, I seem to be living a double life because at work exclusively I use Windows as a development platform but of course the company uses virtual machines running Linux.
Today I want to write about OpenCV the Open Source Computer Vision Library originally started by Intel, but now developed and used by many. It seems to me to be one of the most exciting projects available to anyone who uses Windows, IOS, Ubuntu or Android. In a very short space of time I was able with OpenCV and other open source projects to build a simple application to process pictures taken from different angles and reconstruct a 3D image. Not only did the project work on Ubuntu but also worked on Windows. That is the sort of image processing that ten years ago I dreamed about!
Today I am working on an Android / Windows / Linux application that extends my camera operation to allow long exposure photos to be taken. I am experimenting with motion detection so that I can stack multiple images with automatic alignment. The end result should be an application that can take reasonable photographs of the stars. It seems that for Open Source the sky is the limit, thank you Linus Torvalds and the rest!
