PyImageSearch Gurus: The big list of computer vision topics you’ll master inside my course.

A couple days ago ago I mentioned that on Wednesday, January 14th I am launching a Kickstarter to fund my new project — PyImageSearch Gurus: A course, community, and development environment dedicated to turning you into a computer vision guru.

As promised, here is the complete list of topics to be covered inside the PyImageSearch Gurus course. And if you have a suggestion of a topic to cover, just leave a comment on this post or send me a message, and I’ll see if we can make it happen!

Computer Vision and OpenCV Basics

• Image basics
• Loading, displaying, and saving images
• Drawing
• Image processing
• Histograms
• Smoothing and blurring
• Morphological operations
• Thresholding
• Gradients and edge detection
• Contours

Automatic license plate recognition

• Preparing your training data
• Finding the license plate in images
• Training your classifier
• Classifying license plate numbers and digits

Deep Learning

• Basic introduction to deep learning
• Case Studies:
  • Deep Belief Networks
  • Convolutional Neural Networks
  • …applied to various datasets such as
    • MNIST
    • CIFAR

Face Recognition

• Preparing and pre-preprocessing your data
• Eigenfaces

Building your own custom object detector

• Preparing your training data
• Selecting an image descriptor
• The sliding window technique
• Training a classifier
• Hard negative mining
• Object detection

Content-Based Image Retrieval/Image Search Engines

• Constructing a Bag of Visual Words
  • Codebook construction
  • Vector quantization
  • Hard vs. soft codeword assignment
• Searching
• Inverted indexes
• Tf-idf weighting
• Spatial verification

Standard Image Classification

• Image pyramids
• Selecting appropriate image descriptors
• Evaluation on various datasets, including:
  • Caltech-101
  • Flowers 17
  • …and many more

Describing Images with Image Descriptors

• Keypoints (DoG, Harris, etc.)
• Local invariant descriptors (SIFT, SURF, etc.)
• Histogram of Oriented Gradients
• Haralick texture
• Local Binary Patterns
• Zernike moments
• Hu moments
• …and many more

Computer Vision Case Studies

• Face detection in images and photos
• Eye tracking
• Object tracking in video
• Handwriting recognition
• Plant classification
• License plate recognition
• Finding regions of text in document images
• Measuring distance from camera to object in image

Hadoop + Big Data

• Preparing images for use on HDFS
• Introduction to Hadoop and MapReduce
• Running computer vision jobs on MapReduce
• Elasticsearch and Accumulo for indexing and retrieval
• High-throughput face detection
• High-throughput feature extraction

So there you have it! The complete list of topics to be covered inside PyImageSearch Gurus. I hope after looking over this list you are as excited as I am!

Remember, if you see a topic that is not on the list that you want me to cover, just send me a message — this is your course and I want to tune it to what you want to learn.

To be notified when the Kickstarter Rewards list goes live, be sure to signup to receive PyImageSearch Gurus updates!

I’ll see you on Monday with the finalized Kickstarter Rewards list…