libcvd Documentation

Information

This C++ library is designed to be easy to use and portable for fast video saving, loading and display. It supports OpenGL and X Windows. It is released under the LGPL License.

Features

Language

• Modern C++ design
  • Optimized assembly code
• Extensive use of exceptions
• OpenGL wrappers

Imaging

• Type-safe easy to use images
• Flexible loading and saving from a variety of types:
  • Native
    • PNM
    • BMP
    • ASCII text
    • FITS
    • PS (saving only)
    • EPS (saving only)
  • External libraries required
    • JPEG
    • TIFF
    • PNG
  • 1/8/16/32 bit signed and unsigned integer and 32/64 bit floating point images in greyscale, RGB and RGBA.
  • Optimum bit depth and colour depth selected automatically
• Image grabbing from video sources:
  • Linux
    • Video for Linux devices

Video for Linux 2 devices

• Firewire cameras

Firewire over USB cameras produced by PointGrey - see http://www.ptgrey.com/products/fireflymv/index.asp
Use DVBuffer3 for that and make sure to set an image resolution

• IRIX
  • DMedia video capture
• OSX
  • QuickTime video capture
• All UNIX platforms
  • Live capture from HTTP server push JPEG cameras.
• All platforms
  • AVI and MPEG file (all codecs supported by ffmpeg)
  • list of images
    • Server push multipart JPEG streams.
• Convenient run-time selection using a URL-like syntax

Colorspace conversions on images and video streams

• Various image processing tools
  • FAST corner detection
    • Harris/Shi-Tomasi corner detection
    • Connect components analysis
    • Image interpolation and resampling
    • Convolutions
    • Drawing in to images
    • Flipping, pasting, etc
    • Interpolation, warping and resampling
    • Integral images
• Camera calibration support: Linear, Cubic, Quintic and Harris
  • Program to calibrate cameras from video

Mathematical

• Lie Group(S03, SE3) algebra
• Iterative and reweighted least-squares
  • Random numbers

Portability

LibCVD will compile on any reasonable unixy environment, with a reasonable C++ compiler (e.g. gcc version >= 3.1) and GNU Make. Additionally, libCVD supports both normal and cross compilers. It is known to work on:

-Well tested (current):

• Linux: x86, x86-64
• Linux: ARM LPC3180, XScale (cross compile)
• uCLinux: Blackfin (cross compile)
• FreeBSD: x86
• OpenBSD: XScale
• Mac OS X: x86, PPC
  • Supports the OSX build environment including:
    • Frameworks
    • .dylib libraries
• Cygwin: x86
• MinGW: x86 (native and cross compile)
• Win32: Visual Studio 2008, 2005

-Has worked on (current status unknown):

• Linux: PPC
• Solaris: SPARC
• IRIX SGI O2: MIPS

Compiling

The normal system works:

        ./configure
        make 
        make install

libCVD fully supports parallel builds (make -j2 for instance).

Library bugs/issues

There are a few known library bugs which prevent the libraries working with libCVD

• TooN: If you have gcc >= 4.2.0 you need a version of TooN at least as recent as SNAPSHOT_20080725.

Compiler bugs

There are a few known compiler bugs which affect libCVD on various platforms.

• ppc-darwin (Mac OS X, on PPC)
  • Does not support gcc 3.3 (20030304) due to possible compiler bug.
  • Workaround: none. Install a more recent compiler.
• arm-linux (cross compiler running on i686-pc-linux-gnu)
  • Internal compiler error with: gcc version 3.4.0 20040409 (CodeSourcery ARM Q1 2004) on:
    • cvd_src/videosource.cc
    • pnm_src/jpeg.cc
  • Remove cvd_src/videosource.o from Makefile and use --disable-jpeg
  • Compile files with -O2 instead of -O3

Windows

For Win32 systems, the build directory contains project files for different versions of Visual Studio. Currently the vc2008 solutin is supported and should work out of the box. There are two projects, one for compiling libcvd and one for installing it into a common directory tree. Both projects assume the existence of three environment variables describing the location of header, library and binary files (for DLLs).

• INCLUDEDIR contains the header files. libcvd headers will be copied into %INCLUDEDIR%\
• LIBDIR contains library files. libcvd static libraries (debug and release verions) will be copied into %LIBDIR%
• BINDIR is not used for libcvd, but would be the default directory for DLLs

libCVD requires at least two libraries to compile:

• pthreads-win32 at http://sourceware.org/pthreads-win32/
• jpeg-7 at http://www.ijg.org/

Both libraries should be moved into the directory tree described by INCLUDEDIR, LIBDIR and BINDIR where the libCVD project files will expect them.

libCVD compiles to static libraries for simpler linking and to avoid the _dllexport/_dllimport statements throughout the code.

Configuration of features is manual through a default config file in build/vc2005/config.h. Edit this file to change your configuration, for example to support other image formats such as PNG.