All about the Mat class

In the previous chapters, you experienced using the Mat class of the OpenCV framework very briefly, but we're going to dig a little bit deeper now. The Mat class, which borrows its name from the matrix, is an n-dimensional array capable of storing and handling different mathematical data types in single or multiple channels. To simplify this further, let's take a look at what an image is in terms of computer vision. An image in computer vision is a matrix (therefore a two-dimensional array) of pixels, with a specified width (number of columns in the matrix) and height (number of rows in the matrix). Furthermore, a pixel in a grayscale image can be represented with a single number (therefore a single channel), with a minimum value (usually 0) representing the black and a maximum value (usually 255, which is the highest number possible with one...