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Setup OpenCV on Linux

  • Article

You need to install OpenCV for CNTK 2.3 and above, if you want to build any of the the following:

  • CNTK Image Reader
  • CNTK Image Writer - required to use Tensorboard's Image feature.

If you plan to use both CUDA and OpenCV, install CUDA first

OpenCV can have many interfaces and options. In this section we cover only parts necessary to build CNTK. Read more about installing OpenCV here and more generally here.

Important

Install OpenCV using the exact version and target path as specified below. This is necessary because it is expected by the CNTK build configuration program.

  • Install OpenCV prerequisites. See OpenCV installation instructions for the full package list and explanations. See your platform documentation on how to install the packages.

Example: for Ubuntu use the following command:

sudo apt-get install cmake libgtk2.0-dev pkg-config libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev
  • Get OpenCV and install it. Use the following commands:
wget https://github.com/Itseez/opencv/archive/3.1.0.zip
unzip 3.1.0.zip
cd opencv-3.1.0
mkdir release
cd release
cmake -D WITH_CUDA=OFF -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RELEASE -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local/opencv-3.1.0 ..
make all
sudo make install

Note that in the instructions above we suggest using "plain" make rather than make -j. We found that using make -j with OpenCV results in unstable system behavior and may result in a build failure and system crash.