Installing OpenCV on Linux
Here is brief description on how to build the latest version of OpenCV. See INSTALL file shipped with OpenCV for more detail, and also the main InstallGuide and Ubuntu/Debian Install Guide for OpenCV. The required packages are listed below:
- GCC 4.3 or later. In Ubuntu/Debian it can be installed with
sudo apt-get install build-essential
- CMake 2.6 or higher
- Subversion (SVN) client
- GTK+ 2.x or higher, including headers (e.g. libgtk2.0-dev)
- pkgconfig
- libpng, zlib, libjpeg, libtiff, libjasper with development files (e.g. libjpeg-dev)
- Python 2.3 or later with developer packages (e.g. python-dev)
- SWIG 1.3.30 or later
libavcodec etc. from ffmpeg 0.4.9-pre1 or later + headers. (Video support with FFMPEG)
- libdc1394 2.x + headers for video capturing from IEEE1394 cameras
Getting OpenCV source code from the repository
Enter your working directory (denoted as ~/<your_working_dir> below) and type:
cd ~/<your_working_dir> svn co https://code.ros.org/svn/opencv/trunk/opencv
to get the current OpenCV snapshot (updated daily), or
cd ~/<your_working_dir> svn co https://code.ros.org/svn/opencv/branches/2.3
to get the latest official release (updated roughly 1 or 2 times per year).
Compilation
To build OpenCV using cmake, type the following:
cd ~/<your_working_dir>/opencv # the directory should contain CMakeLists.txt, INSTALL etc. mkdir release # create the output directory cd release cmake -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RELEASE -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local -D BUILD_PYTHON_SUPPORT=ON ..
You will see the configuration results. Various build options can be adjusted interactively using CMake GUI. Then you build the library and install it to the target directory:
make sudo make install
Path Configuration
In order to use the libraries in Linux, thier path should be specified. Library path can be specified in /etc/ld.so.conf.d/ by creating a file called 'opencv.conf' which contains the opencv library path (Default configuration is /usr/local/lib). Once the file is created, execute
sudo ldconfig -v
to make new set library pathes effective. Or you can also add the path to LD_LIBRARY_PATH:
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
Test OpenCV
You can run the correctness tests cxcoretest and cvtest for a quick sanity check:
cd ~/<your_working_dir>/opencv/release/bin ./cxcoretest ./cvtest -d ~/<your_working_dir>/opencv/tests/cv/testdata/cv
You can also build and run OpenCV samples:
cd ~/<your_working_dir>/opencv/samples/c . build_all.sh ./delaunay # try other samples (some of them require a camera) ...