Installing OpenCV with Pi Cam Board Compatability

[Ketta]

Hello all, sorry for bothering you.

I have been trying over the last two days or so to get OpenCV up and running on my Raspberry Pi for a motion detection project I am working on. There are plenty of great resources that I have stumbled upon for this, but many of them are outdated or conflicting and I have found myself with a bookmark folder full of dead-ends and a Pi filled with broken libraries and outdated git downloads. (For example, I spent a few hours trying to get Pierre Raufasts' and Emil Valkov's older MMAL libraries running before discovering the addition of our newer v4l2 driver.)

Can anyone give me a short list of steps for this installation, or an updated link to check out the play-by-play of OpenCV installation?
If I am putting 2 and 2 together correctly, I think I might need to:
*Start a New Raspbian installation
*Update the Firmware to access the v42l driver
*Run the code listed Here. (although this has not worked for me yet)
*Use make to build the latest version of OpenCV (Not quite sure how to get it on the Pi to do so. I think the apt-get opencv is 2.3.1 and thus not useable?)
--Also heard this takes a few hours to build. That's fine with me if it ensures I am able to get this running!
*Determine the install locations of these things and how to include them in a Makefile?

Sorry, I'm sure that little list there must be a pain to read. I've been working with the Pi off and on, but I think waveform80's Python Picamera library has spoiled me a little bit. It is fantastic, but not quite what I need to do this more complex motion-based job, unfortunately.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[6by9]

Yes, update the Pi with sudo rpi-update first.
Ignore the stuff on the V4L2 thread for now - you only need it once you have the OpenCV library built.

Instructions for building OpenCV on the Pi - http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewt ... 38#p527385
Instead of the wget, I'd recommend you do

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git clone https://github.com/Itseez/opencv.git

instead to get the absolute latest and be able to update easily.

When building OpenCV I found it best to reduce the amount of RAM given to the GPU, otherwise memory got very tight and started throwing random errors. I think it was about 4 hours to compile (I left it overnight). I'd also suggest you DON'T start X and just run the build from the command line to save more memory whilst compiling.

Reboot.

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sudo modprobe bcm2835-v4l2

to load the V4L2 driver.

startx, and then do stuff in OpenCV.
I used the code on http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewt ... cv#p528389 as a start point - slap it in a text file, chmod 755 file, ./file did it for me and brought up a preview window. (Read the second page of http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewt ... 38#p531638 for the discussions on latency. OpenCV can't keep up with V4L2, so dropping the framerate requested reduces it significantly).

Hope that helps.

[BerryPicker]

Can anyone give me a short list of steps for this installation, or an updated link to check out the play-by-play of OpenCV installation?

From the $ command line prompt I typed in
sudo apt-get install libopencv-dev python-opencv
You can also link OpenCV objects to the pi cam board with picamera
http://picamera.readthedocs.org/en

[Ketta]

Thanks for the tips! I'm working on 6by9's suggestion now. I'll see how that goes and report back in a few hours I guess.

Okay, one more question I guess. When running the commands suggested in that thread:

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sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake pkg-config python-dev libgtk2.0-dev libgtk2.0 zlib1g-dev libpng-dev libjpeg-dev libtiff-dev libjasper-dev libavcodec-dev 

I get a LOT of 404 not found errors in the console output. Is this normal and expected for May 2014? I would assume it just means some of those libraries are deprecated or the like.

EDIT: OH, I didn't understand that "swig" was part of the same line entry. I'll start this step over again.

You can also link OpenCV objects to the pi cam board with picamera
http://picamera.readthedocs.org/en

Oh wow! I must have missed that part of the documentation before. I'll probably stick to C++ implementations for now as it is my primary language, but I'll be sure to keep that in mind in case I can adapt the Python library for a better solution down the road.

[ghans]

Do run a

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sudo apt-get update

Most propably the info stored on your Pi on what is available in
the repos has become outdated , above command updates that.

ghans

[Ketta]

Thanks ghans, I ran that command once I started over. Pretty easy to mess up the order of things when you are a Linux/RPi noobie.