Marcelo Jo

Hello,

Today it’s a small tutorial to install SimpleCV in Ubuntu. SimpleCV is a opensource framework for computer vision application development. It’s not a replacement for OpenCV, indeed it uses OpenCV as others libraries. As they say in their website: This is computer vision made easy. 

Personnaly I think this is a good tool to create prototypes, try new ideas, algorithms, etc. since we write applications in Python. If the idea is approved you can optimize your solution with OpenCV. It provides an interactive shell, like octave/matlab, where we can write small scripts esay and fast.

This project is very well maintened, lots of docs, how to, tutorials. You can visit the project page here.

Installing SimpleCV

As mentionned before, SimpleCV uses OpenCV and then you need to install it before continue. You can check this post to learn how to install OpenCV in Ubuntu. A little note here: as in november/2014, SimpleCV wasn’t compatible with OpenCV 3.0 and because of that in this tutorial we’ll use OpenCV 2.4.9 and SimpleCV 1.3.

1) First install dependencies

sudo apt-get install ipython python-opencv python-scipy python-numpy python-pygame python-setuptools python-pip

2) Download SimpleCV last version here. If you prefer, you can clone directly from github here.

3) In the directory where you saved SimpleCV type

sudo dpkg -i ./SimpleCV-1.3.deb

or

$ git clone https://github.com/sightmachine/SimpleCV.git
$ cd SimpleCV/
$ sudo pip install -r requirements.txt
$ sudo python setup.py install

4)  To test is really easy.

$ mkdir test_simplecv
$ cd test_simplecv
$ wget https://marcelojo.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/lenna.png
$ simplecv
SimpleCV:1>img = Image("lena_result-e1408715225232.png")
SimpleCV:1>img.show()

If everything is right, you will see this classic picture of Lenna.

As you can see, SimpleCV is really easy. In the next posts we’ll make use of this 3 tools: Octave, OpenCV and SimpleCV, showing some theorie and implementation as well.

Marcelo Jo

Marcelo Jo is an electronics engineer with 10+ years of experience in embedded system, postgraduate in computer networks and masters student in computer vision at Université Laval in Canada. He shares his knowledge in this blog when he is not enjoying his wonderful family – wife and 3 kids. Live couldn’t be better.