After yesterday’s good work output, today was less of a worthwhile effort at the lab. Managed to make just one target (A green rhombus), and tried testing the axis camera.
Which brings me to my rant – the axis cameras are annoying to the extreme! First, more often thatn not, they fail to respond to my browser requests, and when they do, after repeated plugging/unplugging of lan cables (and muttered curses) they show the video for a few seconds and then just – crash.
I think that this had something to do with the fact that I’ve set the resolution at 1280, as I remember that setting it at 640×480 didn’t give me any issues. Am at a loss as to how to fix things. Perhaps its because the router. I’ll have to test and see.
Also tried out the bullet wireless transceivers. The camera on the plane managed to send video feed back, and the embedded people heaved a sigh of relief. If they only knew what’s wrong with the other camera…
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Yes! Finally! I got the code working on linux!
-Drum roll-
Had to configure Code::Blocks. There were minor hiccups in configuring Code::Blocks, name ly the include libraries. How I managed to get the code running was by
- Creating a new console project in Code::Blocks
- Going to Project -> Build options, and in Linker Settings, added the whole gamut of library files (in the ‘Other Linker options’). For the sake of completeness, they were
-lopencv_core -lopencv_imgproc -lopencv_highgui -lopencv_ml -lopencv_video -lopencv_features2d -lopencv_calib3d -lopencv_objdetect -lopencv_contrib -lopencv_legacy -lopencv_flann - In the Search Settings, added
/usr/local/include/opencv/for the compiler tab, and/usr/local/lib/for the linker tab - The next step involved copying all my source files and headers in the project directory, and including them in the project. And that’s it!
- EDIT: That, apparently, is not it. To locate the shared libraries the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable needs to be set to the path of the opencv lib directory –
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib/
So, with that done finally, we can move on with
- Porting this code to the BeagleBoard/SBC
- Further development work, most notably getting the letter and shape recognition neural networks working. That shouldn’t take too much effort – the new interfaces can be explored.
- Updating the code to C++ according to the new framework. Now that would involve considerable (re-)learning.
And, here is an output of the code on the Raven logo! (Yes, loads of work is unfinished. But things are looking good! )
As had been envisioned much earlier, the move to Linux has started. As expected, it looked intimidating at first, but patient reading of the build docs and fixing the network back in the lab (read always-on internet) has allowed me to get the latest version of OpenCV (2.2) and build it. It required quite a few development packages, and although I also downloaded IPP and TBB, which seem to be good things (i.e., they’ll help run the code faster) I don’t know as yet if they would work on the BeagleBoard as and when it arrives. Anyway, the first priority being running the existing OpenCV2.0 code, I had to go about making the OpenCV build.
A few things that were learnt in the process:
- Fedora (yes, I prefer Fedora to Ubuntu – it’s more cutting edge, imho) does not come with gcc installed. I precluded its not being there in the vanilla build.
- gcc-c++ has to be installed as well. Even after installing gcc, cmake kept crying over some missing CXX_Compiler. A quick google search got me the solution to my quandary. Makes me wonder why they aren’t in the dependency list for cmake anyway.
- Having completed the build, I happily set about trying to compile the sample code using gcc. After repeated failures I realized that the apostrophes used in the configuring arguments are tilted (`) Whoa. Never seen anything like that earlier.
- I also realized that I had installed the repository version of OpenCV, which was still configured in cflags and clib. Erased it, only to realize that my PKG_CONFIG_PATH paths I added using in the 2.2 install process didn’t work. Went about rebuilding the OpenCV code and performing all the OpenCV installation all over again. No dice. Haw.
- Figured out that the install path is at /usr/local/lib. So, that’s where to point PKG_CONFIG_PATH.
- Another annoying thing. After closing the terminal window, pkg-config’s PATH reverted to its previous value. Fixed it by copying the generated opencv.pc file in /usr/local/lib to /usr/lib64/pkgconfig along with the other default .pc files. Always loaded. Yay.
Kumar Shaurya
I Code Raven! 