OpenCV Experience

I have been tinkering with Computer Vision these days. And it's was quite a while when i stumbled upon OpenCV an open source platform for computer vision developments. First impression, I was amazed and in fact very amazed however after downloading it from SourceFourge, it came out the installation was quite a challenge, especially for development in Visual Studio. I'm not a Microsoft fan, but I use Visual Studio for rapid development. However, with OpenCV's installation, it wasn't really rapid anymore.

There were no available binaries of OpenCV (2.0) for visual studio. Only the source was available for download. After downloading the source the next plan was to compile it to Windows compatible binaries that can also be linked to Visual Studio C++. Although it was very difficult and to be honest I spent hours on it, I still managed to compile the source code and finally test it on Visual Studio. So here's what I exactly did.

Download OpenCV

Download CMake

Install them both, directly on C:\

Use Cmake to make Visual Studio compilable source code from the original OpenCV source code

On CMake, on the where is the source code, place the path of OpenCV, C:\OpenCV

On where to build the binaries, place a new path C:\OpenCV\VS2008

After that, click configure

Uncheck everything related to Python

Check that one related to samples

Clicked generate, if you cant, click configure, until generate is enabled

After generating, open the solution created on C:\OpenCV\VS2008

Build both release and debug versions

Add windows PATH settings the \lib of Open

Right click on “My Computer”, click on "Properties" then “Advanced System Settings” and finally "Environment Variables"

Add the path of the OpenCV /lib directory to the “PATH” in the System “Variables window”

Add the following - tobecontinued :)

This is outdated! The new release for OpenCV has a better support for Visual Studio - up to 2010. Thank you for visiting this site. You can download and see more information on OpenCV from this link. - Updated on Feb 02, 2011.