Detecting cats in images with OpenCV - PyImageSearch

Did you know that OpenCV can detect cat faces in images…right out-of-the-box with no extras? But after Kendrick Tan broke the story, I had to check it out for myself…and do a little investigative work to see how this cat detector seemed to sneak its way into the OpenCV repository without me noticing (much like a cat sliding into an empty cereal box, just waiting to be discovered). In the remainder of this blog post, I'll demonstrate how to use OpenCV's cat detector to detect cat faces in images. This same technique can be applied to video streams as well. If you take a look at the OpenCV repository, specifically within the haarcascades directory (where OpenCV stores all its pre-trained Haar classifiers to detect various objects, body parts, etc.), you'll notice two files: Both of these Haar cascades can be used detecting "cat faces" in images.