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shimat/opencvsharp

★ 5,979C#Audience · developerComplexity · 2/5LicenseSetup · easy

TLDR

A .NET/C# wrapper for OpenCV that lets you do image processing, object detection, video streaming, and computer vision from C# without writing any C++ code.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((opencvsharp))
    What it does
      Image processing
      Object detection
      Video streams
      Feature matching
    Tech
      C# bindings
      OpenCV 4.13
      NuGet packages
    Platform support
      Windows
      Linux
      Headless servers
    Limitations
      No CUDA support
      No Unity or Xamarin
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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Add image resizing, filtering, and color conversion to a C# application using familiar OpenCV functions.

USE CASE 2

Build an object detection or feature matching pipeline in .NET without leaving the C# ecosystem.

USE CASE 3

Process video streams from a C# app on Windows or Linux, including headless servers using the slim package.

USE CASE 4

Integrate OpenCV opencv_contrib extensions into a .NET project via a single NuGet install command.

Tech stack

C#.NETOpenCVC++NuGet

Getting it running

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 5min
Open source under a permissive license, use freely for any purpose including commercial.

In plain English

OpenCvSharp is a .NET wrapper for OpenCV, a widely used library for image processing and computer vision. OpenCV itself is written in C++, so this project provides C# bindings that let .NET developers call OpenCV functions without leaving the C# ecosystem. The wrapper supports .NET 8 and later.NET Standard 2.0 and 2.1 (which covers a wide range of .NET versions including older .NET Framework from version 4.6.1 onward), and works on Windows and Linux. It is distributed as NuGet packages, the standard package manager for .NET, so adding it to a project is a single command. There are separate packages for Windows and Linux, with an optional slim variant for Linux that strips out the graphical display components, making it suitable for headless servers and containers. In terms of what it lets you do: image processing operations like resizing, filtering, and color conversion, object detection, feature matching, reading and writing image files and video streams, and many other computer vision tasks that OpenCV provides. The README notes that the API is modeled closely on OpenCV's own C/C++ interface, so code examples and documentation written for the original library translate fairly directly. A few limitations are clearly stated: it does not support CUDA for GPU acceleration, and it does not work on Unity or Xamarin. The project wraps OpenCV version 4.13.0, including the optional opencv_contrib extensions. It is open source and licensed under a permissive license. The full README is longer than what was shown.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Using OpenCvSharp in C#, load an image, resize it to 640x480, convert it to grayscale, and save the result to disk.
Prompt 2
Show me how to capture frames from a webcam using OpenCvSharp and detect faces in each frame using a Haar cascade.
Prompt 3
Write a feature matching example in C# with OpenCvSharp that compares two images using ORB descriptors and draws matching keypoints side by side.
Prompt 4
How do I set up OpenCvSharp on a headless Linux server using the slim NuGet package that excludes graphical display components?
Prompt 5
Using OpenCvSharp, read a video file frame by frame, apply a Canny edge filter to each frame, and write the result to a new video file.
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