Cross referencing OpenCV

Doxygen is a tool to generate documentations like the OpenCV documentation you are reading right now. It is used by a variety of software projects and if you happen to use it to generate your own documentation, and you are using OpenCV inside your project, this short tutorial is for you.

Imagine this warning inside your documentation code:

/**
 * @warning This functions returns a cv::Mat.
 */

Inside your generated documentation this warning will look roughly like this:

Warning: This functions returns a cv::Mat.

While inside the OpenCV documentation the cv::Mat is rendered as a link:

Warning: This functions returns a cv::Mat.

To generate links to the OpenCV documentation inside your project, you only have to perform two small steps. First download the file opencv.tag (right-click and choose "save as...") and place it somewhere in your project directory, for example as docs/doxygen-tags/opencv.tag.

Open your Doxyfile using your favorite text editor and search for the key TAGFILES. Change it as follows:

TAGFILES = ./docs/doxygen-tags/opencv.tag=http://docs.opencv.org/4.2.0

If you had other definitions already, you can append the line using a \:

TAGFILES = ./docs/doxygen-tags/libstdc++.tag=https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/latest-doxygen \

./docs/doxygen-tags/opencv.tag=http://docs.opencv.org/4.2.0

Doxygen can now use the information from the tag file to link to the OpenCV documentation. Rebuild your documentation right now!

Note: To allow others to also use a *.tag file to link to your documentation, set GENERATE_TAGFILE = html/your_project.tag. Your documentation will now contain a your_project.tag file in its root directory.

Cross referencing OpenCV

References