Computer Vision Library in D

[Relja Ljubobratovic via Digitalmars-d-announce]

Hey guys, thank you all for responding!

> Standard modules for color conversion already exists. See for 
> instance

That's awesome, thanks! - I'll look into it!

> Wouldn't it be easier to just write bindings to C interface of 
> OpenCV, or make a thin D-style wrapper over that API, and use a 
> proven widely supported computer vision library rather than try 
> to reinvent the wheel?

I've given this a lot of thought. I use OpenCV daily on the job, 
and I'm very familiar with it. I too believe it would probably be 
smarter, faster and safer to wrap its C interface with D, from 
the user's point of view.
The reason why I chose not to do it is it's complexity - OpenCV 
has everything implemented/integrated inside - linear algebra, 
machine learning, optimization and all the other submodules that 
are needed for cv. In the dcv project, I'd really like to rely on 
third party libraries for such functionality - actualy I was 
encouraged and inspired to do it because of DlangScience guys. 
I'm hopping that scid and other such libraries would get a 
interface with ndslice in time, which is the reason I chose to 
use it as main array structure in the library. I believe (as many 
do I'm sure) that through the ndslice, D would get numeric 
ecosystem nice and well integrated as python, which I think would 
be a great success for the language.

So the long story short - we could build a opencv wrapper, but 
here I wanted to start building something that would more nicely 
fit with DlangScience and other D libraries.

> You've got a bad @trusted here
Thanks - I'll fix it and try to learn bit more about @trusted!

> I am happy to see that you use ndslice. We start to build 
> numeric library for science and machine learning. SVM, which is 
> used in CV is in out TODO list. You are welcome for feature 
> request and for contributing.

Hey Ilya! The text above tells that I've been closely following 
your work, and that I hope ndslice plays important part in D's 
numeric future. I will of course watch the SVM and other such 
projects from you guys, and will contribute whenever I can - 
thanks a lot for your effort!

> I'm interested in contributing towards parts that involve 
> machine learning/numerical optimisation. I have written some of 
> my own CV/ML programs with D in the past, but none of them are 
> particularly well engineered since they were all intended for 
> just my own use.

That's great, thanks Henry! As I've noted above, I think it would 
be wise to keep modules like ML and optimization apart from this 
library, and to integrate dcv with them through ndslice. Maybe 
it's more likely that you could contribute to DlangScience's SVM 
libray with those parts? But any of your previous CV experience 
is more than welcome for DCV - I'll contact you on the github so 
we could discuss this further, hope that's ok.