Image Processing with Python: A Beginner’s Guide to OpenCV and Pillow

Learn how to manipulate images using two popular libraries, OpenCV and Pillow

Photo by Ouael Ben Salah on Unsplash

In today’s world of social media and visual content, image processing has become an essential skill for data scientists and developers alike. With the help of powerful libraries such as OpenCV and Pillow, you can easily perform various operations on images, from resizing and cropping to applying filters and detecting objects.

This guide will introduce you to the basics of image processing using these two libraries.

OpenCV vs Pillow: What’s the Difference?

Before we dive into the specifics of each library, let’s take a moment to understand what makes them unique.

• OpenCV: Originally developed by Intel, OpenCV is a highly optimized library for real-time computer vision. It supports a wide range of programming languages, including C++, Python, Java, and MATLAB. OpenCV provides numerous functions for image and video processing, feature detection, object detection, machine learning, and more.
• Pillow: Also known as PIL (Python Imaging Library), Pillow is a lightweight library specifically designed for working with images in Python. It offers basic…