VisionLab Features Library
Andrea Vedaldi and Brian Fulkerson
INSTALLING
In most cases, you do not need to compile or build the documentation
as described below. Instead, to use with MATLAB, simply cd to the
toolbox directory and type vl_setup.
Binaries are created in the bin/XXX directory, where XXX changes
depending on the architecture. We support the following (the naming
reflects MATLAB naming for MEX files):
- mac Mac OS X PPC
- maci Mac OS X Intel
- glx GNU Linux i386
- g64 GNU Linux x64
- w32 Windows
- w64 Windows (64 bit)
The executable binaries can be installed anywhere in the command
line path (the directory contains also the static library).
More details may be found in the provided HTML documentation
(doc/index.html).
COMPILING
The core library and command line utilities require a common C
compiler supporting the C-90 standard and some C-99 extension (GCC
and Visual C will do) plus a few common extension (see APPENDIX). To
compile the MEX files, MATLAB needs also to be installed.
LINUX AND MAC OS X. Make sure to have a recent version of GCC (at
least 4.0) and GNU make (at least 3.81) installed. Edit the
Makefile to adjust the paths to MATLAB and the mex command, or to
disable MATLAB support. Then issue
> cd vlfeat
> make
Earlier versions of GCC and make can be used, but this requires
hacking the Makefile.
WINDOWS. We provide a Microsoft NMAKE Makefile (Makefile.mak) that
has been tested under Visual C++ 2008 Express and Matlab R2008a (minor
adjustments may be required for other versions). Open the Visual C terminal,
cd into the VLFeat directory and issue.
> nmake /f Makefile.mak
For Windows 64 use
> make /f Makefile.mak ARCH=w64
If you do not have Visual C++ 2008, or you have an older version of
Matlab and wish to compile the mex files _only_, then you may start
from our binary distribution. Enter the toolbox directory:
> cd toolbox
And run our mex compilation script from the Matlab command line:
> vl_compile
This has been tested with Matlab R14 and lcc, but other
configurations should only require minor tweaking.
CREATING THE DOCUMENTATION
This task is handled by various Makefile that have been tested under
Mac OS X and Linux only. Compiling the documentation requires the
following additional tools
- fig2dev (part of transfig)
- a modern LaTeX with
+ pdflatex
+ dvips
+ htlatex (possibily part of TeX4ht)
+ dvipng (possibily a separated package)
- doxygen
FIGURES. Figures are preprocessed by typing
> make -C doc/figures
However you need to run some MATLAB code to generate part of the
figures to start with. To this end, load MATLAB and (provided that
everything is compiled and installed correctly) type
> vl_demo
TUTORIAL. To compile the tutorial, issue
> make doc-deep
> make doc
SOURCE CODE DOCUMENTATION. To compile the source code documentation
type
> make doc-api
See the file doc/index.html for an overview.
APPENDIX
CODE COMPATIBILITY. In addition to the C-90 standard, the C compiler
is supposed to support the following common features:
- long int (64 bit integer) support
- variadic macro support
The SSE accelerated code requires the compiler to support Intel
intrisic. GCC and Visual C both satisfy all the requirements.
CHANGES
0.9.5 Added kd-tree and new SSE-accelerated vector/histogram
comparison code. Improved dense SIFT (dsift) implementation.
0.9.4 Added quick shift. Renamed dhog to dsift and improved
implementation and documentation. Improved tutorials.
Added 64 bit Windows binaries. Many other small changes.
0.9.3 Namespace change (everything begins with a vl_ prefix
now). Many other changes to provide compilation support
on Windows with Matlab 7.
beta-3 Completions to the ikmeans code.
beta-2 Many completions.
beta-1 Initial public release.
