For some time, I have been using OpenCV. It satisfied all my needs of feature extraction, matching and clustering(k-means till now) and classification(SVM). Recently, I came across Apache Mahout. But, most of the algorithms for machine learning are already available in OpenCV as well. Are there any advantages of using Mahout over OpenCV if the work relates to Videos and Images ?
This question might be put on hold since it is opinion based. I still want to add a basic comparison.
OpenCV is capable of anything about vision and ml that is possibly researched, or invented. The vision literature is based on it, and it develops according to the literature. Even the newborn ml algorithms -like TLD, originated on MATLAB- (http://www.tldvision.com/) can also be implemented using OpenCV (http://gnebehay.github.io/OpenTLD/) with some effort.
Mahout is capable, too and specific to ml. It includes not only the well known ml algorithms, but also the specific ones. Say you came across to a paper "Processing Apples with K-means Orientation Filtering". You can find OpenCV implementations of this paper all around the web. Even the actual algorithm might be open source and developed using OpenCV. With OpenCV, say it takes 500 lines of code, but with Mahout, the paper might be already implemented with a single method making everything easier
An example about this case is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canopy_clustering_algorithm, which is harder to implement using OpenCV right now.
Since you are going to work with image data sets you will need to learn about HIPI, too.
To sum up, here is a simple pro-con table:
know-how (learning curve): OpenCV is easier, since you already know about it. Mahout+HIPI will take more time.
examples: Literature + vision community commonly use OpenCV. Open source algorithms are mostly created with C++ api of OpenCV.
ml algorithms: Mahout is only about ml, whereas OpenCV is more generic. Still OpenCV has access to basic ml algorithms.
development: Mahout is easier to work with in terms of coding and time complexity (I am not sure about the latter, but I reckon it is).