OpenCV 3.0 alpha was released in August, after long delays and time management problems that pushed the project past the projected release date of May 2014. Until it is fully released and pushed into the package managers, OpenCV must be built manually in order to use it in projects. This post will give instructions on how to build and install OpenCV 3, from installing the dependencies to verifying that the Python extensions were correctly installed.
You must make sure a few dependencies are installed before you try to build OpenCV 3, some of which may already be installed.
On a Debian based system such as Ubuntu, you can install all of these requirements with:
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$ sudo apt-get install cmake
$ sudo apt-get install python3 python3-dev python3-numpy
$ sudo apt-get install gcc
On a Yum based system such as Fedora, you can install all of these requirements with:
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$ sudo yum install cmake
$ sudo yum install python3 python3-devel python3-numpy
$ sudo yum install gcc gcc-c++
If your package system does not provide numpy, you can install it through
pip (or pip3) with:
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$ sudo pip3 install numpy
By this point, you should have all of the required dependencies installed.
Since we are installing OpenCV 3 from the source, you will need to download a copy on your system and extract it into a directory.
If you have Git installed on your system, this is as simple as cloning the GitHub repository:
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git clone --branch 3.0.0-alpha --depth 1 https://github.com/Itseez/opencv.git
or, if you are using a version of Git before 1.8:
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git clone https://github.com/Itseez/opencv.git
git checkout 3.0.0-alpha
If you do not have Git installed, or are not planning on manually building OpenCV in the future for newer versions, you can justdownload the zip file from GitHub. You should extract everything within this zip file to a directory on your system.
Now that the OpenCV source is on the system, and all of the dependencies have
been installed, we can start building OpenCV. This will require you to move to
the OpenCV source directory and make a subdirectory called release, where all
of the generated release files will be generated.
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$ cd /path/to/opencv-3.0.0-alpha
$ mkdir release
$ cd release
OpenCV uses CMake, which is a cross-platform build tool, to build all of the libraries and extensions for languages such as Python and Java. It relies heavily on using VPATH builds, which were mentioned in the Autotools post, so the build files can be separate from the source files. When building when CMake, the build type should be set to a release, so any included optimizations will be made.
For builds on Fedora, or systems where packages are installed to /usr instead
of /usr/local by default, you will need to set the build prefix as well using
-D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr.
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$ cmake -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RELEASE -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$(python3 -c "import sys; print(sys.prefix)") -D PYTHON_EXECUTABLE=$(which python3) ..
$ make -j4
$ sudo make install
CMake will generate a set of Makefiles that can build OpenCV by calling make,
and later installed by calling make install as root. As it can take a long
time to build all of OpenCV, there is an option to parallelize parts of it by
including the -j flag, followed by the number of threads that should be used.
On most modern systems, this number can be between 2 and 6, with higher end (or
gaming) systems being able to handle 8 or more. It is recommended to use
multiple threads when building OpenCV to speed up the process.
In theory, this is all it should take for CMake to generate a Python 3 build for you. You should check the CMake output and make sure it is planning on using Python 3 instead of Python 2. Because of how the CMake checks are set up for OpenCV, it has a tendency to prefer Python 2 if it can find it, even if you tell it to use Python 3. To get around this issue, you can tell CMake where to look for all of the Python 3 directories, which will force it to install under Python 3 instead.
If you are installing for Python 2, you can call cmake without any special
PYTHON_* variables, and it should install it to Python 2 without any problems.
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$ (cmake -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RELEASE
-D PYTHON_INCLUDE_DIR=$(python3 -c "from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_inc; print(get_python_inc())")
-D PYTHON_EXECUTABLE=$(which python3)
-D PYTHON_PACKAGES_PATH=$(python3 -c "from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print(get_python_lib())") ..)
Because CMake sees 3.3 as being larger than 2.7, it will accept all Python 3 paths in the Python 2 section, and later install under Python 3 instead of Python 2.
Once you have installed OpenCV using sudo make install, you can verify that it
has been installed by opening up the Python 3 shell.
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$ python3
Python 3.4.0 (default, Apr 11 2014, 13:05:11)
[GCC 4.8.2] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import cv
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named 'cv'
>>> import cv2
>>> cv2.__file__
'/usr/local/lib/python3.4/dist-packages/cv2.cpython-34m.so'
>>> cv2.__version__
'3.0.0-dev'
>>> exit()
Your output may contain a different directory for the cv2 file location, as it
varies depending on the system. The version may also be different, but as long
as it says 3.0.0 (or higher) instead of 2.4.1, you should be fine.
We first checked to see if cv could be imported, as this was the original
OpenCV module name. OpenCV 1 and 2 included this module, but it was finally
removed in OpenCV 3.
Once you have done this, and everything looks fine, you should be all set to use OpenCV 3 in your projects.
If you get a CMake error early in the process such as:
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CMake Error: your CXX compiler: "CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER-NOTFOUND" was not found. Please set CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER to a valid compiler path or name.
You may have forgotten to install a C++ compiler such as GCC. Make sure that all of the dependencies stated at the start of this post are installed before trying again.
If you get output after doing the cmake command that correctly detects your
Python interpreter, but does not detect the version of it, then you most likely
have an outdated version of CMake. This is most likely the case for anyone
installing OpenCV on Ubuntu 12.04, as the version of CMake included is severely
out of date.
You can tell if it is not detecting the version number correctly, because the detected version will be blank.
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-- Python 3:
-- Interpreter: /home/travis/virtualenv/python3.4.2/bin/python (ver )
You should make sure the version of CMake you have installed is above 2.8.8.
On Ubuntu 12.04, you can use the kalakris/cmake PPA to install an updated
version of CMake.
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sudo add-apt-repository --yes ppa:kalakris/cmake
sudo apt-get update -qq
sudo apt-get install cmake
This will give you CMake 2.8.12, which includes the updated Python version
detection.