Despite the holidays and hot summer days, OpenCV dev team continues to work hard for you, dear users. We’ve just prepared the next update in OpenCV 2.4 series, called 2.4.2. It should be binary compatible with OpenCV 2.4.1 (except for the face recognizer from contrib module) and therefore it is a sincerely recommended upgrade.

Thanks to everybody who helped to make the release this good!

OpenCV 2.4.2 is available as a package at SourceForge or as a snapshot (tagged as 2.4.2) of our OpenCV 2.4 branch in SVN:
http://code.opencv.org/svn/opencv/branches/2.4/opencv

The nicely formatted changelog can be seen here: http://code.opencv.org/projects/opencv/wiki/ChangeLog and here is the text-only version:

• It’s not about the code, but now we have the brand-new user site and the new stack overflow-like site with answers to most popular questions http://answers.opencv.org.
• Android package introduces a new service-based distribution model (see http://code.opencv.org/projects/opencv/wiki/Android_Release_Notes for details).
• opencv2.framework for iOS has been created. You can either download the binary from SourceForge or build it yourself using the simple guide. Also, you may be interested to look at some OpenCV on iOS samples, created by our GSoC 2012 students Eduard and Charu: http://code.opencv.org/svn/gsoc2012/ios/trunk and read the slides of the tutorial.
• New keypoint descriptor FREAK has been contributed by EPFL group: Kirell Benzi, Raphael Ortiz, Alexandre Alahi and Pierre Vandergheynst. It’s claimed to be superior to ORB and SURF descriptors, yet it’s very fast (comparable to ORB). Please, see http://code.opencv.org/svn/opencv/trunk/opencv/samples/cpp/freak_demo.cpp.
• Improved face recognizer and excellent tutorial on using it has been added by Philipp Wagner. Check the tutorial at http://docs.opencv.org/2.4/modules/contrib/doc/facerec/index.html.
• Another 50 bugs have been fixed since 2.4.1 release.

You are welcome to try out the latest and greatest OpenCV!