OpenCV.js: computer vision processing for the open web platform

Abstract

The Web is the world's most ubiquitous compute platform and the foundation of digital economy. Ever since its birth in early 1990's, web capabilities have been increasing in both quantity and quality. However, in spite of all such progress, computer vision is not mainstream on the web yet. The reasons are historical and include lack of sufficient performance of JavaScript, lack of camera support in the standard web APIs, and lack of comprehensive computer-vision libraries. These problems are about to get solved, resulting in the potential of an immersive and perceptual web with transformational effects including in online shopping, education, and entertainment among others. This work aims to enable web with computer vision by bringing hundreds of OpenCV functions to the open web platform. OpenCV is the most popular computer-vision library with a comprehensive set of vision functions and a large developer community. OpenCV is implemented in C++ and up until now, it was not available in the web browsers without the help of unpopular native plugins. This work leverage OpenCV efficiency, completeness, API maturity, and its communitys collective knowledge. It is provided in a format that is easy for JavaScript engines to highly optimize and has an API that is easy for the web programmers to adopt and develop applications. In addition, OpenCV parallel implementations that target SIMD units and multiprocessors can be ported to equivalent web primitives, providing better performance for real-time and interactive use cases.