I have a degree in Electrical Engineering (focusing on VLSI). However, I am more mathematically minded, and only recently discovered that image processing seems to contain lots of interesting maths. I am looking to break into this field in a about a year or so in spite of not having any formal experience in this area.
I was wondering: would contributing to code development on one of the open source projects help my cause? Would this enable me to overcome my lack of formal education or experience in this field?
I would also appreciate it if someone could point me to good open source resources. I know of GitHub and Nasa's Vision workbench. However, I have not contributed to any open source projects and I don't know what to expect.