2.0

(September, 2009)

>>> New functionality, features:

  - General:
    * Installation package on Windows has been fixed,
      MinGW is used for precompiled binaries
      (see the release notes on the SourceForge site)
      
    * autotools-based build has been repaired

  - MLL:
    * The new-style class aliases (e.g. cv::SVM ~ CvSVM) and the train/predict methods,
      taking cv::Mat in addition to CvMat, have been added. So now MLL can be used
      more seamlesly with the rest of the restyled OpenCV.

>>> Bug fixes:

  - A _lot_ of bugs present in 2.0 beta have been fixed, see the OpenCV bug tracker
    http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=22870&atid=376677
    Thanks to everybody who submitted bug reports and/or patches!

2.0 beta

(September, 2009)

>>> New functionality, features: <<<

  - General:
    * The brand-new C++ interface for most of OpenCV functionality
      (cxcore, cv, highgui) has been introduced.
      Generally it means that you will need to do less coding to achieve the same results;
      it brings automatic memory management and many other advantages.
      See the C++ Reference section in opencv/doc/opencv.pdf and opencv/include/opencv/*.hpp.
      The previous interface is retained and still supported.
      
    * The source directory structure has been reogranized; now all the external headers are placed
      in the single directory on all platforms.
      
    * The primary build system is CMake, http://www.cmake.org (2.6.x is the preferable version).
        + In Windows package the project files for Visual Studio, makefiles for MSVC,
          Borland C++ or MinGW are note supplied anymore; please, generate them using CMake.
      
        + In MacOSX the users can generate project files for Xcode.
        
        + In Linux and any other platform the users can generate project files for
          cross-platform IDEs, such as Eclipse or Code Blocks,
          or makefiles for building OpenCV from a command line.
          
    * OpenCV repository has been converted to Subversion, hosted at SourceForge:
      http://opencvlibrary.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/opencvlibrary
      where the very latest snapshot is at
      http://opencvlibrary.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/opencvlibrary/trunk,
      and the more or less stable version can be found at
      http://opencvlibrary.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/opencvlibrary/tags/latest_tested_snapshot
      
  - CXCORE, CV, CVAUX:
  
    * CXCORE now uses Lapack (CLapack 3.1.1.1 in OpenCV 2.0) in its various linear algebra functions
      (such as solve, invert, SVD, determinant, eigen etc.) and the corresponding old-style functions
      (cvSolve, cvInvert etc.)
  
    * Lots of new feature and object detectors and descriptors have been added
      (there is no documentation on them yet), see cv.hpp and cvaux.hpp:
      
      + FAST - the fast corner detector, submitted by Edward Rosten
      
      + MSER - maximally stable extremal regions, submitted by Liu Liu 
      
      + LDetector - fast circle-based feature detector by V. Lepetit (a.k.a. YAPE)
      
      + Fern-based point classifier and the planar object detector -
                       based on the works by M. Ozuysal and V. Lepetit
                       
      + One-way descriptor - a powerful PCA-based feature descriptor,
        (S. Hinterstoisser, O. Kutter, N. Navab, P. Fua, and V. Lepetit,
        "Real-Time Learning of Accurate Patch Rectification").
        Contributed by Victor Eruhimov
      
      + Spin Images 3D feature descriptor - based on the A. Johnson PhD thesis;
        implemented by Anatoly Baksheev
      
      + Self-similarity features - contributed by Rainer Leinhart
      
      + HOG people and object detector - the reimplementation of Navneet Dalal framework
        (http://pascal.inrialpes.fr/soft/olt/). Currently, only the detection part is ported,
        but it is fully compatible with the original training code.
        See cvaux.hpp and opencv/samples/c/peopledetect.cpp.
        
      + Extended variant of the Haar feature-based object detector - implemented by Maria Dimashova.
        It now supports Haar features and LBPs (local binary patterns);
        other features can be more or less easily added
        
      + Adaptive skin detector and the fuzzy meanshift tracker - contributed by Farhad Dadgostar,
        see cvaux.hpp and opencv/samples/c/adaptiveskindetector.cpp
    
    * The new traincascade application complementing the new-style HAAR+LBP object detector has been added.
      See opencv/apps/traincascade.
      
    * The powerful library for approximate nearest neighbor search FLANN by Marius Muja
      is now shipped with OpenCV, and the OpenCV-style interface to the library
      is included into cxcore. See cxcore.hpp and opencv/samples/c/find_obj.cpp
      
    * The bundle adjustment engine has been contributed by PhaseSpace; see cvaux.hpp
      
    * Added dense optical flow estimation function (based on the paper
      "Two-Frame Motion Estimation Based on Polynomial Expansion" by G. Farnerback).
      See cv::calcOpticalFlowFarneback and the C++ documentation
        
    * Image warping operations (resize, remap, warpAffine, warpPerspective)
      now all support bicubic and Lanczos interpolation.
      
    * Most of the new linear and non-linear filtering operations (filter2D, sepFilter2D, erode, dilate ...)
      support arbitrary border modes and can use the valid image pixels outside of the ROI
      (i.e. the ROIs are not "isolated" anymore), see the C++ documentation.
      
    * The data can now be saved to and loaded from GZIP-compressed XML/YML files, e.g.:
      cvSave("a.xml.gz", my_huge_matrix);
      
  - MLL:
    * Added the Extremely Random Trees that train super-fast,
      comparing to Boosting or Random Trees (by Maria Dimashova).
      
    * The decision tree engine and based on it classes
      (Decision Tree itself, Boost, Random Trees)
      have been reworked and now:
      + they consume much less memory (up to 200% savings)
      + the training can be run in multiple threads (when OpenCV is built with OpenMP support)
      + the boosting classification on numerical variables is especially
        fast because of the specialized low-overhead branch.
        
    * mltest has been added. While far from being complete,
      it contains correctness tests for some of the MLL classes.

  - HighGUI:
    * [Linux] The support for stereo cameras (currently Videre only) has been added.
      There is now uniform interface for capturing video from two-, three- ... n-head cameras.
      
    * Images can now be compressed to or decompressed from buffers in the memory,
      see the C++ HighGUI reference manual

  - Documentation:
    * The reference manual has been converted from HTML to LaTeX (by James Bowman and Caroline Pantofaru),
      so there is now:
      + opencv.pdf for reading offline
      + and the online up-to-date documentation
        (as the result of LaTeX->Sphinx->HTML conversion) available at
        http://opencv.willowgarage.com/documentation/index.html
        
  - Samples, misc.:
    * Better eye detector has been contributed by Shiqi Yu,
      see opencv/data/haarcascades/*[lefteye|righteye]*.xml
    * sample LBP cascade for the frontal face detection
      has been created by Maria Dimashova,
      see opencv/data/lbpcascades/lbpcascade_frontalface.xml
    * Several high-quality body parts and facial feature detectors
      have been contributed by Modesto Castrillon-Santana,
      see opencv/data/haarcascades/haarcascade_mcs*.xml
   
>>> Optimization:
    * Many of the basic functions and the image processing operations
      (like arithmetic operations, geometric image transformations, filtering etc.)
      have got SSE2 optimization, so they are several times faster.
      
    - The model of IPP support has been changed. Now IPP is supposed to be
      detected by CMake at the configuration stage and linked against OpenCV.
      (In the beta it is not implemented yet though).
      
    * PNG encoder performance improved by factor of 4 by tuning the parameters

>>> Bug fixes: <<<
    TBD
    (see http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=22870&atid=376677 of the list
    of the closed and still opened bugs).
    
    Many thanks to everybody who submitted bug reports and/or provided the patches!

>>> Known issues:
    * configure+autotools based build is currently broken.
      Please, use CMake.
    * OpenCV bug tracker at SF still lists about 150 open bugs.
      Some of them may be actually fixed already, and most of the remaining bugs
      are going to be fixed by OpenCV 2.0 gold.
    * IPP is not supported. As the new OpenCV includes a lot of SSE2 code,
      it may be not such a serious problem, though.
      The support (at least for most important functions that do not have
      SSE2 optimization) will be returned in 2.0 gold.
    * The documentation has been updated and improved a lot, but it still
      needs quite a bit of work:
        - some of the new functionality in cvaux is not described yet.
        - the bibliography part is broken
        - there are quite a few known bugs and typos there
        - many of the hyperlinks are not working.
    * The existing tests partly cover the new functionality
      (via the old backward-compatibility OpenCV 1.x API), but the coverage is
      not sufficient of course.
    * The new-style Python interface is not included yet  

    Many of the problems will be addressed in 2.0 gold.
    If you have found some specific problem, please, put the record to the bug tracker:
    http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=22870
    Better if the bug reports will include a small code sample in C++/python +
    all the necessary data files needed to reproduce the problem.

1.1pre1

(October, 2008)


>>> New functionality/features: <<<

  - General:
    * Octave bindings have been added. See interfaces/swig/octave (for now, Linux only)
    * [Windows] OpenCV is now built with VS2005 with SSE2 and OpenMP support
      included (if you want to rebuild OpenCV using Express or
      Standard Edition of VS, use _make\opencv.vs2005.no_openmp.sln).
    * [Windows] Python bindings have been updated to use Python 2.6
    * [Windows] cvcam has been removed (as videoInput is now supported by highgui)

  - CXCORE, CV, CVAUX:
    * Speeded-up Robust Features (SURF), contributed by Liu Liu.
      see samples/c/find_obj.cpp and the documentation opencvref_cv.htm
    * Many improvements in camera calibration:
      - Added stereo camera calibration: cvStereoCalibrate, cvStereoRectify etc.
      - Single camera calibration now uses Levenberg-Marquardt method and supports
        extra flags to switch on/off optimization of individual camera parameters
      - The optional 3rd radial distortion parameter (k3*r^6) is now supported in
        every calibration-related function
    * 2 stereo correspondence algorithms:
      - very fast block matching method by Kurt Konolige
        (processes the Tsukuba stereo pair in <10ms on Core2Duo laptop)
      - slow but more accurate graph-cut based algorithm by Kolmogorov and Zabin
    * Better homography estimation algorithms (RANSAC and LMEDs)
    * new C++ template image classes contributed by Daniel Filip (Google inc.).
      see opencv/cxcore/include/cvwimage.h
    * Fast approximate nearest neighbor search (by Xavier Delacour)
    * Codebook method for background/foreground segmentation (by Gary Bradski)
    * Sort function (contributed by Shiqi Yu)
    * [OpenCV+IPP] Face Detection (cvHaarDetectObjects) now runs much faster
      (up to 2x faster) when using IPP 5.3 or higher.
    * Much faster (~4x faster) fixed-point variant of cvRemap has been added

  - MLL:
    * Python bindings for MLL have been added. There are no samples yet.

  - HighGUI:
    * [Windows, 32bit] Added support for videoInput library.
      Hence, cvcam is [almost] not needed anymore
    * [Windows, 32bit] FFMPEG can now be used for video decoding/encoding
      via ffopencv*.dll
    * [Linux] Added unicap support
    * Improved internal video capturing and video encoding APIs

  - Documentation:
    * OpenCV book has been published (sold separately :) see docs/index.htm)

  - New samples (opencv/samples):
    * Many Octave samples
    * find_obj.cpp (SURF), bgfg_codebook.cpp (Codebook BG/FG segmentation),
      stereo_calib.cpp (Stereo calibration and stereo correspondence)

>>> Bug fixes: <<<
     Many thanks to everybody who submitted bug reports and/or provided the patches!

    * added dma_unlisten to icvCloseCAM_DC1394 (thanks to Victor Benso)
    * LMEDs algorithm for cvFindFundamentalMat estimation has been fixed
    * Broken debug build of highgui in VS2005/2008 (SF #2056185, SF #1709435)
    * cvFindChessboardCorners memory leak and incorrect size checks
      (SF #1972896, SF #1910323)
    * disabling GTK causes v4l runtime error (SF #2088102)
    * cvsetmousecallback bug (SF #2053529)
    * libhighgui needed deprecated "img_convert" replacement (SF #2011753)
    * Segfault in createsamples caused by uninitialized variable (SF #1977989)
    * Data Alignment Issue in bgfg_gaussmix (SF #1961755)
    * libpng need to be updated (SF #1952793)
    * cvCreateVideoWriter_Win32 - identifier not found (SF #1944254)
    * Bug in cvmorph.cpp (SF #1908844)
    * dilate (cvDilate) works bogus with default kernel (SF #1887130)
    * CvEM non-default constructor declared but not defined (SF #1830346)
    * cvFloodFill (in ver 1.0) Hangs (SF #1790565)
    * double delete in CvImage (SF #1733437)
    * cvFilter2D anchor default value is not working properly (SF #1713779)
    * cvCvtColor - Bug? in converting HSV2RGB (SF #1676344)
    * Invalid selection of the MKL-dll version in cvUseOptimized() (SF #1633017)
    * ...

>>> Known issues:
    * Borland compiler is not supported (but might work) in this update.
    * 64-bit Windows is not supported (but might work) in this update.
    * SF bug tracker still contains over 50 records of open bugs.
      Many of them will be addressed in the next update.

1.0

(October, 2006)

>>> New functionality/features: <<<

  - General:
    * Windows installation package now includes precompiled Python module
    * Borland C++ (v5.6+) makefiles re-added (see _make\make_all_bc.mak)

  - CV:
    * Inpainting was added, see samples/c/inpaint.cpp
      (thanks to Alexander Kibkalo and Alexey Kalinichenko)

  - MLL:
    * Boosted tree classifiers added, see MLL reference manual

  - HighGUI:
    * Jpeg2000 and EXR support in highgui using JasPer and OpenEXR (thanks to Nils Hasler)
      OpenEXR is not built-in to highgui on Windows by default. See
      otherlibs/_graphics/readme.txt.
    * >8-bit image input/output for PNG, Jpeg2000 and OpenEXR (thanks to Nils Hasler)
    * Updated CMUcamera wrapper.
    * Several V4L2 improvements and fixes
  
  - New samples (opencv/samples):
    * Camera calibration sample: calibrate.cpp
    * Inpainting sample: inpaint.cpp
    * Letter recognition using the existing database with
      random trees/boosted trees/neural nets: leter_recog.cpp
    * A few new Python samples.

  - Tests:
    * Most old cv tests have been rewritten/converted to use cxts instead of trs.
      TRS is not used by the tests anymore.
    
>>> Bug fixes: <<<
     Many thanks to everybody who submitted bug reports and/or provided the patches!

     * Incorrect normalization in cvFindFundamentalMat (SF #1550855)
     * Occasional cvGetQuadrangleSubPix crashes (SF #1549168)
     * Occasional cvCalcOpticalFlowPyrLK crashes
     * Internal GCC 3.x error in cvFloor/cvCeil (SF #1546657)
     * Several Python-related bugs (SF #1570109, SF #1572800, SF #1543593)
     * Bugs in contour processing/rendering (SF #1550889, 
     * x86-64 related bugs (SF #1526133, SF #1527997)
     * OpenCV dispatcher tried to load old versions of IPP (pre 4.x)
       that caused many failures (see SF #1555093, for example)
     * Inaccurate results in some cases in cvFitEllipse, cvFitLine, cvHoughCircles.
     * Severe bug in Bayesian classifier, broken regression tree in MLL
     * Overflow in blurring filter
     * cvSaveImage() modified saved images leading to potential problems in threaded apps.
     * Numeric values in XML/YAML were emitted/parsed incorrectly
       on some non-US locales in Linux
     * VS2005 Express/Standard Editions could not build OpenCV
       (due to missing OpenMP support)
     * ...

>>> Known issues:
    * Certain tests may fail on IA64 (Itanium), e.g.
      gaussian filter, fundamental matrix estimation, chessboard detector.
...