Monday, February 4, 2013

Installing OpenCV on Ubuntu

To find out what version of ubuntu you have, type this at the command prompt
> lsb_release -a

For me, the answer is Ubuntu 12.04.1. Here are the sequence of steps that led to a successful OpenCV install (using terminal )

1. Download OpenCV 2.4.3 from here http://opencv.org/downloads.html
2. Unpack tar file and create a directory called release
~/OpenCV-2.4.3/release
3. Make sure packages are installed using the command
> sudo apt-get install [package-name]

where packages I installed were (these may not be required but I installed them anyways)
build-essential cmake pkg-config libpng12-0 libpng12-dev libpng++-dev libpng3 libpnglite-dev
zlib1g-dbg zlib1g zlib1g-dev
libjasper-dev libjasper-runtime libjasper1
pngtools libtiff4-dev libtiff4 libtiffxx0c2 libtiff-tools
libjpeg8 libjpeg8-dev libjpeg8-dev libjpeg8-dbg libjpeg-progs libjpeg-dev
ffmpeg libavcodec-dev libavcodec52 libavformat52 libavformat-dev
libgstreamer0.10-dev libgstreamer0.10-0 libgstreamer0.10-0-dbg
libv4l-dev
yasm
libtbb-dev libqt4-dev libtbb2

You may need some other things like numpy, python etc. which I already had.

4. Run cmake command with following flags
> cmake -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RELEASE -D BUILD_EXAMPLES=ON -D BUILD_DOCS=ON -D BUILD_NEW_PYTHON_SUPPORT=ON -D WITH_TBB=ON -D WITH_CUDA=OFF -D WITH_QT=ON ..

5. 'make' and then 'sudo make install'

Oh one thing I forgot to mention which may or may not make a difference, is that I installed ffmpeg from source by downloading from ffmpeg.org. The configure script had a few flags that were enabled... again not sure if this makes a big difference to the success of the build/install of opencv.

How to get apt-get to work behind a proxy in Ubuntu

Add the following line (you need to modify to your situation)
Acquire::http::proxy "http://[username]:[password]@[www.proxy.net]:[port_number]/";
to this file /etc/apt/apt.conf