Answer by sammy for Hi everyone,I have been unable to find a solution for my problem, where cv::Mat image = cv::imread("path/to/file.jpg"); works in debug, but not in release build.I am using Visual C++ on Windows and OpenCV 2.4.2. My code just finds a file on disk and reads it using cv::imread. When in Debug mode, I can use cv::imshow to show the loaded image and it will. When in a release build, it won't. I have discovered that for some reason the loaded image in the release build has 1 channel, while the same image in a debug build has three.The exception is:OpenCV Error: Bad flag (parameter or structure field) (Unrecognized or unsupported array type) in unknown function, file ......\src\opencv\modules\core\src\array.cpp, line 2482The include, and lib folders are the same for my release build as my debug build. I don't understand what's going wrong, but I would like to be able to create a release build of my program for the production environment.

**The first thing to do** (And this is true for absolutely any program, in any language, in any configuration) is to check your input before processing it. So, modify your code with this lines: cv::Mat img = cv::imread(in_path); if(img.empty()) { cout << "Error! Could not read the image from disk" return -1; } cv::imshow("image", img); // No exception should be thrown here now And going back to your problem, most probably you have a different Release directory, and from that one, your image is not visible. so, if you have your image in `MyProject/Debug/img.png`, it will work in debug mode, but when your exe is in `MyProject/Release/myprogram.exe`, trying to load a relative path will fail