image processing for a noob

i have been given a project where i will need to write code such that it parts of images. For example the project will require me to extract a river part from the scenery or so. I have no experience in this context. Please tell me where do i start studying form. Which are good books? Which technologies will i need to l开发者_如何学Cearn. What are the tools that are helpful?

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openCV is probably the most complete free image processing library. There is also a book which describes both the library and some image processing techniques.

This is a reasonably complex problem, not exactly graduate research but challenging!

See this question for a list of other books.

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ImageJ is an easy to use, scriptable, modular, open source software, which may be quite useful in learning image processing. As for books, Digital Image Processing by Gonzalez et al. is de facto standard.

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Unsure if this Q is closed but I recommend NetPBM and similar packages. This allows you to define images as text and perform operations but in a manner (albeit slow processing) that makes it very easy to understand.