OpenCV powers the computer vision behind your phone's camera, autonomous vehicles, hospital screening systems, and even NASA's Mars helicopter — and most people using it have no idea. Sam sits down with Satya Mallick, CEO of the nonprofit OpenCV.org, to trace its 26-year history and where it's headed next.

Topics covered:

• OpenCV's origins at Intel in 2000 under Dr. Gary Bradsky, and why it was open-sourced to democratize computer vision research
• Why OpenCV sees roughly a million downloads a day and remains foundational infrastructure
• OpenCV5's new DNN inference engine — 40% faster than ONNX Runtime on models like YOLO26
• Real-world deployments: the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge-winning car and NASA's Mars helicopter
• Why classical (non-neural) computer vision still matters for speed- an ...