Installation in Linux

These steps have been tested for Ubuntu 10.04 but should work with other distros.

Required packages

• GCC 4.4.x or later. This 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 (libgtk2.0-dev)

• pkgconfig

• Python 2.6 or later and Numpy 1.5 or later with developer packages (python-dev, python-numpy)

• ffmpeg or libav development packages: libavcodec-dev, libavformat-dev, libswscale-dev

• [optional] libdc1394 2.x

• [optional] libjpeg-dev, libpng-dev, libtiff-dev, libjasper-dev.

All the libraries above can be installed via Terminal or by using Synaptic Manager

Getting OpenCV source code

You can use the latest stable OpenCV version available in sourceforge or you can grab the latest snapshot from the SVN repository.

Getting the latest stable OpenCV version

• Go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencvlibrary
• Download the source tarball and unpack it

Getting the cutting-edge OpenCV from SourceForge SVN repository

Launch SVN client and checkout either

1. the current OpenCV snapshot from here: http://code.opencv.org/svn/opencv/trunk
2. or the latest tested OpenCV snapshot from here: http://code.opencv.org/svn/opencv/tags/latest_tested_snapshot

In Ubuntu it can be done using the following command, e.g.:

cd ~/<my_working _directory>
svn co http://code.opencv.org/svn/opencv/trunk

Building OpenCV from source using CMake, using the command line

1. Create a temporary directory, which we denote as <cmake_binary_dir>, where you want to put the generated Makefiles, project files as well the object filees and output binaries

2. Enter the <cmake_binary_dir> and type

   cmake [<some optional parameters>] <path to the OpenCV source directory>
   

   For example

   cd ~/opencv
   mkdir release
   cd release
   cmake -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RELEASE -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local ..
   

3. Enter the created temporary directory (<cmake_binary_dir>) and proceed with:

   make
   sudo make install
   

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.