Image Contour Detection Error: OpenCV, C++ - c++

Question

I am trying to write a program to detect contours within an image using OpenCV in the C++ environment.
The problem with it is that I don't get a compile error, but instead a runtime error. I have no idea why; I followed the book and OpenCV documentation sources to build the code below and it should work fine but it doesn't... any ideas on what might be wrong...?
#include "iostream"
#include<opencv\cv.h>
#include<opencv\highgui.h>
#include<opencv\ml.h>
#include<opencv\cxcore.h>
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <opencv2/core/core.hpp> // Basic OpenCV structures (cv::Mat)
#include <opencv2/highgui/highgui.hpp> // Video write
using namespace cv;
using namespace std;
Mat image; Mat image_gray; Mat image_gray2; Mat threshold_output;
int thresh=100, max_thresh=255;
int main(int argc, char** argv) {
//Load Image
image =imread("C:/Users/Tomazi/Pictures/Opencv/ayo.bmp");
//Convert Image to gray & blur it
cvtColor( image,
image_gray,
CV_BGR2GRAY );
blur( image_gray,
image_gray2,
Size(3,3) );
//Threshold Gray&Blur Image
threshold(image_gray2,
threshold_output,
thresh,
max_thresh,
THRESH_BINARY);
//2D Container
vector<vector<Point>> contours;
//Fnd Countours Points, (Imput Image, Storage, Mode1, Mode2, Offset??)
findContours(threshold_output,
contours, // a vector of contours
CV_RETR_EXTERNAL, // retrieve the external contours
CV_CHAIN_APPROX_NONE,
Point(0, 0)); // all pixels of each contours
// Draw black contours on a white image
Mat result(threshold_output.size(),CV_8U,Scalar(255));
drawContours(result,contours,
-1, // draw all contours
Scalar(0), // in black
2); // with a thickness of 2
//Create Window
char* DisplayWindow = "Source";
namedWindow(DisplayWindow, CV_WINDOW_AUTOSIZE);
imshow(DisplayWindow, contours);
waitKey(0);
return 1;
}

Answer 1

I bet that you are using the MSVC IDE. Anyway, your code has a lot of problems and I've covered most of them on Stackoverflow. Here they go:
Escape the slashes
Code safely and check the return of the calls
How Visual Studio loads files at runtime
I suspect that your problem is that imread() is failing because it didn't found the file. The links above will help you fix that.