Contact Us
Contact Us

Discover 16 Exceptional OpenCV Developers

opencv developers - Discover 16 Exceptional OpenCV Developers

OpenCV’s global community is driven by outstanding developers who contribute code, build companies, share knowledge, push the envelope at tech giants, and even win international competitions.

Below is an updated list of top OpenCV developers, selected for their open-source contributions, leadership in computer vision startups, influential teaching and blogging, impactful roles at major tech companies, or accolades in vision competitions. Each entry includes a brief bio highlighting their ties to OpenCV and links to their professional profiles for more insight.

  1. Kwabena Agyeman
  2. Jagadish K. Mahendran
  3. Satya Mallick
  4. Adrian Rosebrock
  5. Prateek Joshi
  6. Ritesh Kanjee
  7. Wu Jia
  8. Murtaza Hassan
  9. Sergio Canu
  10. Shiqi Yu
  11. Vincent Rabaud
  12. Joseph Howse
  13. Olli-Pekka Heinisuo
  14. Jason Saragih
  15. Adrian Kaehler
  16. Abid Rahman K.

Now, let’s delve deeper into their remarkable OpenCV journeys and lasting impacts:

Kwabena Agyeman

YouTube Video

Nationality: Ghanaian-American

Kwabena is the co-founder and CEO of OpenMV, a company known for its OpenMV Cam – a microcontroller-powered camera that runs simplified versions of OpenCV algorithms for edge vision applications.

Originally from Ghana, Kwabena created OpenMV while at Rice University and launched it via Kickstarter. The OpenMV cam (and its IDE) makes it easy for hobbyists to do things like color tracking, face detection, and eye tracking with a few high-level OpenCV-like commands on a small embedded device. OpenMV’s success led to collaborations with OpenCV.org (e.g. OpenMV became an official partner and had joint Kickstarter campaigns). Kwabena’s work extends OpenCV’s philosophy of accessible vision into the embedded realm, empowering a broad maker community to build robots and gadgets with vision.

Jagadish K. Mahendran

Nationality: Indian-American

Jagadish made headlines by winning the inaugural OpenCV AI Competition in 2021 with his invention of an AI-powered, voice-activated backpack for the visually impaired.

At the time a research scientist at Intel, he led team Cortic Tigers to victory with this innovative OpenCV-based device. Jagadish’s project combined OpenCV vision (for obstacle detection and navigation) with deep learning, demonstrating how low-cost hardware and computer vision can have a social impact. The smart backpack was widely covered in the media and exemplified OpenCV’s potential in assistive technology. Jagadish continues to work on cutting-edge applied AI, translating competition success into real-world solutions.

Satya Mallick

Satya Mallick 1 - Discover 16 Exceptional OpenCV Developers

Nationality: Indian-American

Satya is the CEO of OpenCV.org and a driving force in democratizing computer vision. He founded the popular blog LearnOpenCV.com, which has become a go-to resource for developers worldwide.

With a Ph.D. in computer vision, Satya has built a career straddling industry and education – from leading OpenCV’s expansion (including the OpenCV AI Courses and OpenCV University) to founding the BigVision AI consulting firm. Under his leadership, OpenCV has grown into a vibrant global community. Satya regularly shares insights on AI and vision through talks and social media, continuing to inspire the next generation of CV engineers.

Adrian Rosebrock

The real power of OpenCV lies in applying it to solve problems—automating boring tasks, building smart devices, and improving lives.

Nationality: American

Adrian is the founder of PyImageSearch, one of the most influential computer vision blogs for Python developers.

With a PhD in computer science, he has a knack for explaining complex vision concepts in simple terms. Adrian authored books like Deep Learning for Computer Vision and built PyImageSearch into a thriving online community of CV practitioners. His tutorials—often using OpenCV for tasks like face recognition, object detection, and image stitching—have helped hundreds of thousands learn practical CV skills. After successfully running PyImageSearch for years, Adrian transitioned to new ventures, but he remains a prominent educator whose OpenCV code examples are ubiquitous in the community.

Prateek Joshi

Nationality: Indian-American

Prateek is an author and tech entrepreneur who has leveraged OpenCV in both education and industry.

He wrote numerous books on OpenCV and computer vision (over 13 books on AI/ML), including OpenCV with Python By Example, which helped Python users grasp CV fundamentals. He also maintained a popular blog and was a contributing writer on vision topics at Analytics Vidhya. In industry, Prateek founded Pluto AI (Plutoshift), a startup applying CV and AI to industrial IoT, which showcased OpenCV’s utility in smart infrastructure. He later became a venture capitalist, but remains active in the CV community through talks and articles (recently writing about lane detection in 2024). Prateek’s multi-faceted career highlights OpenCV’s role from prototype to product.

Ritesh Kanjee

Ritesh Kanjee - Discover 16 Exceptional OpenCV Developers

Nationality: South African

Ritesh is the founder of Augmented Startups, a platform and YouTube channel where he teaches AI and computer vision.

Based in South Africa, he has built a following for his practical OpenCV tutorials and courses, often demonstrating how to integrate OpenCV with technologies like Raspberry Pi, drones, and augmented reality. Ritesh has over 17 years of experience in AI/ML and has consulted on applying CV in industry. He emphasizes making complex CV techniques (like YOLO object detection or pose estimation) accessible to developers and students. Through his content and training programs, Ritesh has helped put Africa on the map in the OpenCV community.

Wu Jia

Nationality: Chinese

Wu Jia is an OpenCV engineer based in Asia who has made significant contributions through the OpenCV China team.

An active open-source developer, she has worked on improving OpenCV’s modules – for example, she helped migrate the machine learning module to the opencv_contrib repository and added support for new camera hardware. Wu Jia frequently represents OpenCV in workshops and conferences; she has led hands-on sessions on building face recognition systems with OpenCV at international biometrics winter schools. As an author of OpenCV blog posts and a maintainer of OpenCV’s Chinese community outreach, she is instrumental in making OpenCV more robust and in training the next generation of developers.

Murtaza Hassan

Nationality: Pakistani

Murtaza has become a household name among OpenCV learners through his YouTube channel Murtaza’s Workshop – Robotics and AI.

An educator and self-starter, he creates hands-on OpenCV projects – from hand gesture controlled apps to virtual paint – that have inspired many beginners. Murtaza is also the founder of CVZone, a high-level OpenCV-based library that simplifies vision tasks (especially for students and hobbyists). With an academic background from the University of Bristol, he bridges theory and practice in his videos. Murtaza’s engaging tutorials and open-source projects have made computer vision accessible to a global audience.

Sergio Canu

Sergio Canu - Discover 16 Exceptional OpenCV Developers

Nationality: Italian

Sergio is an Italian software engineer and the creator of Pysource, a popular blog and YouTube channel focused on OpenCV in Python.

Since 2017, Sergio has been developing and sharing easy-to-follow tutorials that range from basic image processing to advanced applications like vehicle tracking and OCR. He founded Pysource to provide a structured learning path for CV developers, and his clear explanations have made him a trusted mentor for many. Now based in Bulgaria, Sergio also leads a team building AI vision solutions for clients. His contributions help bridge the gap from academic vision techniques to real-world software.

Shiqi Yu

Nationality: Chinese

Prof. Shiqi Yu is a computer vision researcher and a key member of the OpenCV governance team.

He serves as an Associate Professor at SUSTech (Shenzhen) and has a leadership role as a Board Member of the OpenCV foundation. Shiqi has contributed to OpenCV’s development of face detection and recognition algorithms – the YuNet face detector in OpenCV’s deep learning module is named after him. He also chairs the IAPR Technical Committee on Biometrics, reflecting his expertise in vision-based biometrics. By bridging academia and OpenCV’s open-source efforts, Shiqi helps steer OpenCV’s direction and fosters its adoption in research circles.

Vincent Rabaud

Nationality: French

Vincent is an open-source enthusiast who co-founded the non-profit OpenCV.org foundation with Gary Bradski in 2012.

Hailing from France, Vincent was instrumental in shepherding OpenCV after Willow Garage – he managed perception at Aldebaran Robotics and later joined Google, but kept contributing to OpenCV in his spare time. Vincent co-authored the ORB feature detector (a notable OpenCV algorithm) and led documentation and infrastructure improvements. He also organized OpenCV’s participation in Google Summer of Code for many years, mentoring students to further the library. Vincent’s enduring commitment, from writing code to administrative leadership, helped ensure OpenCV’s continuity as a community-driven project.

Joseph Howse

Joseph Howse - Discover 16 Exceptional OpenCV Developers

Nationality: Canadian

Joseph is a prolific technical writer who has authored multiple books that introduce developers to OpenCV.

Based in Canada, he wrote “OpenCV for Secret Agents”, “Android Application Programming with OpenCV”, and co-authored others like OpenCV 3 Blueprints. Through these books (2013–2017) and his publishing company Nummist Media, Joseph has taught OpenCV concepts to thousands of readers. He is also a software developer and runs his own projects in AR and game development, often blending those with computer vision. Joseph’s approachable writing style and practical examples (e.g. using OpenCV for surveillance, AR, and fun projects) helped demystify OpenCV for many outside the academic realm. He remains active as a developer and novelist, exemplifying the creative side of the CV community.

Olli-Pekka Heinisuo

Nationality: Finnish

Olli-Pekka, known online as “skvark,” solved one of the biggest pain points for OpenCV’s wide adoption: easy installation in Python.

He is the original maintainer of the opencv-python PyPI packages, which provide pre-built OpenCV wheels for Windows, macOS, and Linux. His project, launched independently, became immensely popular and was officially adopted by OpenCV.org in 2021. Thanks to Olli-Pekka’s work, Python users can install OpenCV with a simple pip install, greatly expanding OpenCV’s reach in the data science and education communities. He continues to support the build scripts and CI that keep these packages updated. Heinisuo’s contribution exemplifies open-source community impact, making OpenCV accessible to millions of Python developers.

Jason Saragih

Nationality: Australian-American

Jason is a computer vision researcher best known for developing one of the first widely used real-time face tracking libraries built on OpenCV.

His FaceTracker library (based on Active Appearance Models) allowed robust tracking of facial landmarks and was released in 2010 for OpenCV 2.x. This work later fed into augmented reality effects – Jason co-founded a startup for facial motion capture that was acquired by Facebook. Now as a lead at Meta (Facebook Reality Labs), he continues to apply CV in AR/VR, for example improving Snapchat-style face filters and Meta’s Spark AR platform. Jason’s academic contributions (Ph.D. from ANU) and practical implementations showed how OpenCV could be used for complex non-rigid tracking in real time, influencing both research and consumer applications in AR.

Adrian Kaehler

Adrian Kaehler - Discover 16 Exceptional OpenCV Developers

Nationality: American

Adrian is co-author (with Gary Bradski) of Learning OpenCV, the O’Reilly book that introduced OpenCV to the masses in 2008 (and its updated second edition in 2016).

With a Ph.D. in computer science, Adrian was a senior scientist at Willow Garage, where he worked on both OpenCV and the Robot Operating System (ROS) during their early development. He later co-founded Drive.ai, a self-driving car startup, serving as its President. Adrian’s expertise spans from writing foundational computer vision literature to applying vision in robotics and autonomous driving. While Drive.ai was acquired by Apple in 2019, his influence in the OpenCV community persists through the widely-read texts and algorithms he helped refine in OpenCV’s early years. Kaehler remains an independent consultant and investor, continuing to engage with CV and AI projects.

Abid Rahman K.

Nationality: Indian

Abid is an OpenCV evangelist from India who notably extended OpenCV’s Python tutorials and bindings. During Google Summer of Code 2013, under Alexander Mordvintsev’s mentorship, Abid created dozens of high-quality OpenCV-Python tutorial articles, which are still part of OpenCV’s official documentation.

These tutorials (covering basics like image operations to advanced features like camera calibration) greatly lowered the learning curve for Python users. Abid was also active on Stack Overflow and the OpenCV forum, answering hundreds of vision questions and writing blog posts (like a popular guide on Canny edge detection). He later worked in industry (as a software engineer and data scientist), but he remains known in the OpenCV community for his educational contributions. Abid’s work exemplifies volunteer open-source spirit – his GSoC project has had a lasting impact on OpenCV’s usability.

Wrap Up

These legends represent exceptional talent, making them extremely challenging to headhunt. However, there are thousands of other highly skilled IT professionals available to hire with our help. Contact us, and we will be happy to discuss your hiring needs.

Note: We’ve dedicated significant time and effort to creating and verifying this curated list of top talent. However, if you believe a correction or addition is needed, feel free to reach out. We’ll gladly review and update the page.

Ready to get started?