These steps have been tested for Ubuntu 10.04 but should work with other distros as well.
The packages can be installed using a terminal and the following commands or by using Synaptic Manager:
[compiler] sudo apt-get install build-essential [required] sudo apt-get install cmake git libgtk2.0-dev pkg-config libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev [optional] sudo apt-get install python-dev python-numpy libtbb2 libtbb-dev libjpeg-dev libpng-dev libtiff-dev libjasper-dev libdc1394-22-dev
You can use the latest stable OpenCV version or you can grab the latest snapshot from our Git repository.
Launch Git client and clone OpenCV repository. If you need modules from OpenCV contrib repository then clone it too.
For example
cd ~/<my_working_directory>
git clone https://github.com/Itseez/opencv.git
git clone https://github.com/Itseez/opencv_contrib.git
Create a temporary directory, which we denote as <cmake_build_dir>, where you want to put the generated Makefiles, project files as well the object files and output binaries and enter there.
For example
cd ~/opencv
mkdir build
cd build
Configuring. Run cmake [<some optional parameters>] <path to the OpenCV source directory>
For example
cmake -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local ..
or cmake-gui
Description of some parameters
[optional] Building python. Set the following python parameters:
[optional] Building java.
Build. From build directory execute make, recomend to do it in several threads
For example
make -j7 # runs 7 jobs in parallel
[optional] Building documents. Enter <cmake_build_dir/doc/> and run make with target “html_docs”
For example
cd ~/opencv/build/doc/
make -j7 html_docs
To install libraries, from build directory execute
sudo make install
[optional] Running tests
For example
git clone https://github.com/Itseez/opencv_extra.git
For example
<cmake_build_dir>/bin/opencv_test_core
Note
If the size of the created library is a critical issue (like in case of an Android build) you can use the install/strip command to get the smallest size as possible. The stripped version appears to be twice as small. However, we do not recommend using this unless those extra megabytes do really matter.