Image analysis and computer vision have always been important in industrial and scientific applications. With the popularization of cell phones with powerful cameras and internet connections, images are now increasingly generated by consumers. Therefore, there are opportunities to make use of computer vision to provide a better user experience in new contexts.
In this chapter, we will look at how to apply several techniques you have learned about in the rest of this book to this specific type of data. In particular, we will learn how to use the mahotas computer vision package to extract features from images. These features can then be used as input to the same classification methods we studied in other chapters. We will apply these techniques to publicly available datasets of photographs. We will also see how the same features can be used for finding similar images...