OpenCV error: the function is not implemented

Don't waste your time trying to resolve this issue, this was made clear by the makers themselves. Instead of cv2.imshow() use this:

img = cv2.imread('path_to_image')
plt.imshow(img, cmap = 'gray', interpolation = 'bicubic')
plt.xticks([]), plt.yticks([])  # to hide tick values on X and Y axis
plt.show()

If you installed OpenCV using the opencv-python pip package at any point in time, be aware of the following note, taken from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/opencv-python

IMPORTANT NOTE MacOS and Linux wheels have currently some limitations:

• video related functionality is not supported (not compiled with FFmpeg)
• for example cv2.imshow() will not work (not compiled with GTK+ 2.x or Carbon support)

Also note that to install from another source, first you must remove the opencv-python package

If it's giving you errors with gtk, try qt.

sudo apt-get install libqt4-dev
cmake -D WITH_QT=ON ..
make
sudo make install

If this doesn't work, there's an easy way out.

sudo apt-get install libopencv-*

This will download all the required dependencies(although it seems that you have all the required libraries installed, but still you could try it once). This will probably install OpenCV 2.3.1 (Ubuntu 12.04). But since you have OpenCV 2.4.3 in /usr/local/lib include this path in /etc/ld.so.conf and do ldconfig. So now whenever you use OpenCV, you'd use the latest version. This is not the best way to do it but if you're still having problems with qt or gtk, try this once. This should work.

Update - 18th Jun 2019

I got this error on my Ubuntu(18.04.1 LTS) system for openCV 3.4.2, as the method call to cv2.imshow was failing (e.g., at the line of cv2.namedWindow(name) with error: cv2.error: OpenCV(3.4.2). The function is not implemented.). I am using anaconda. Just the below 2 steps helped me resolve:

conda remove opencv
conda install -c conda-forge opencv=4.1.0

If you are using pip, you can try

pip install opencv-contrib-python