Ever tried getting OpenCV running in Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion)?

Plowing through all the documentation and guides can be a pretty daunting task (well, at least they exist). These simple steps will get you up and running with OpenCV 2.4.2 in XCode 4.5:

First compile, build, and install OpenCV from sources:

1. Install Homebrew. Open Terminal, and run this command ruby -e "$(curl -fsSkL raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)"
2. Run brew install with all of {svn, cmake, ffmpeg, libjpeg, libpng }
3. Get the latest sources for OpenCV (currently OpenCV 2.4.2) here
4. Unpack somewhere and cd into the folder in Terminal
5. Run cmake .
6. Run make && make install

Next step is to create an XCode project that uses OpenCV. This is as simple as creating a new C/C++ project and specifying search path for the OpenCV headers and libraries:

1. Open XCode and choose File > New > Project > Command Line Tool
2. For the target select Build Settings
3. For Header Search Paths, specify /usr/local/include
4. For Library Search Paths, specify /usr/local/lib

In main.cpp, add something like this to test it out:

#include <opencv2/opencv.hpp>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    IplImage *img = cvCreateImage( cvSize(100,200), IPL_DEPTH_8U, 3);
    cvNamedWindow("Hello World!", CV_WINDOW_AUTOSIZE);
    cvShowImage("Hello World!", img);
    cvWaitKey(0);
    cvDestroyWindow("Hello World!");
    cvReleaseImage(&img);

    return 0;
}

An alternative method is to install OpenCV with Homebrew, brew install opencv (not tested), but the dependencies requires amongst other things a fortran compiler, which I didn't want on my system, so I took the slightly more elaborate approach of manually installing dependencies and building OpenCV from source.

Edit:

See also this guide.

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• OpenCV 1