How to install OpenCV 2.4 on your Pandaboard – an addendum

Andrews Sobral has created an excellent tutorial for installing OpenCV on the Pandaboard. In my last post I used a few of his early setup tricks to get a bare-bones install for the best performance.

Instead of recreating his excellence on this blog, I’ll send you there to complete the installation steps. Before you go, however, “I’ve got some great news everyone!”

If you followed my previous post, you can skim through the first portion of his setup and pickup where he instructs you to issue the following command:

sudo apt-get install chkconfig git-core subversion openssh-server

Also and more importantly, with the release of OpenCV 2.4 you no longer have to downgrade ffmpeg to version 0.7 as you can see here Willow Garage now “demand(s)” the latest versions of ffmpeg and libav. I highly recommend using 2.4 as it adds some very cool new features we’ll talk about in later posts (pssst! you can read about them here). The only changes I had to make while following his tutorial to make this happen were:

1. OpenCV > Step 6: Download the newest release instead of 0.7. Follow the rest of his directions exactly.
2. OpenCV > Step 10: Download OpenCV 2.4 and again follow his steps as directed.

Finally, while Andrews documents the use of a Playstation Eye, I’m using a Logitech QuickCam and there are a ton of other great cameras you can use with the same setup. See the list here. My camera shows up as /dev/video3, if that helps.

The video embedded at the top of this post shows the “blob-track” demo functioning at a healthy clip. While I don’t have an exact framerate, my ‘educated’ guess is at least 10fps which is pretty darn good as some of my earlier attempts were achieving 1 frame every four seconds.

As always, please share your feedback.