Basic I/O scripts
Most CV applications need to get images as input. Most also produce images as output. An interactive CV application might require a camera as an input source and a window as an output destination. However, other possible sources and destinations include image files, video files, and raw bytes. For example, raw bytes might be transmitted via a network connection, or they might be generated by an algorithm, if we incorporate procedural graphics into our application. Let's look at each of these possibilities.
Reading/writing an image file
OpenCV provides the imread function to load an image from a file and the imwrite function to write an image to a file. These functions support various file formats for still images (not videos). The supported formats vary—as formats can be added or removed in a custom build of OpenCV—but normally BMP, PNG, JPEG, and TIFF are among the supported formats.
Let's explore the anatomy of the representation of an image...
