Future of Opencv in 20y

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I do not think anyone in here can truly answer the first part of your question and if they could, they probably won't. I would say only folks at Intel can provide a definite answer to this.

Out of sheer speculation, these are my two cents

I think OpenCV will stick around for a looooong time.

1. In the past and currently, it has almost always been the goto library for image processing both in research and academia. Now you might ask, Well everything is headed towards Machine Learning so what's the use of OpenCV? And you will be right but OpenCV officially supported ML since v2.3; at least according to this release note. And they are already supporting today's famous ML libraries.

   And all those ML models released by big tech companies you find online, if you actually read their papers, at the lower levels they are performing some sort of edge detection, thresholding etc in an attempt to isolate the object and detect them. The same goes for tracking.

2. OpenCV offers versatility that current ML models don't; for the time being of course. Meaning, I do not have to collect a lot of data, train my network, tweak hyper-parameters around, shrink my model to be mobile compatible just to say I have the best paper detector with a 98% accuracy. With OpenCV, simple thresholding, contour extraction and either line segment intersections or a corner detector does the trick. I am by no means bashing ML; I am an active supporter and contributor on the contrary, but not all problems require ML. Why call the firemen to put a match out?

3. The fact that it is open source and has a very vibrant community means that its internal and communal developers are and will always be on their tippy toes to continuously improve it.

What will the image processing field look like 20 years from now? It is anyone's guess. But I can tell u it will be anywhere between

Still trying to properly align Snapchat filters --> Having fully autonomous vehicles in the streets

People still creeped out by robots --> Robots being used for medical diagnosis along with specialists

Sales clerks still considered a job/career --> walk in and out of store with a majority of your interaction being with other customers

Then there's AR as well. Just let your imagination run wild here.