OpenCV in Qt example

[Dorfmeister]

Hi guys,

I just ported a small OpenCV example to Maemo. It builds on http://qt-apps.org/content/show.php/...?content=89995 and is available here: http://www.zshare.net/download/771049800b033e35/

I have three short questions about it:

1) Klen and others recommended using OpenCV for an AR application for obvious reasons, but in this example the performance is quite poor. How could it be improved? Is it e.g. better to read the image via GStreamer and then run OpenCV methods over it? This is very important to me, since I'd love to use this library extensively.

2) QtCreator behaves strangely when I try to build this project: It throws 13 errors if I open the augmentedvision.pro (doesn't find opengl/cv.h & opengl/highgui.h) and use "Build All", whereas it compiles perfectly if done manually in a scratchbox shell (qmake augmentedvision.pro; make - build can be found in ./src). Any ideas how to avoid this?

3) If I now want to build a fancy AR app - would you use Qt + GStreamer + OpenCV + OpenGL + SDL or would you stick to a subset? My two starting points are this code, some corner detectors and Klen's OpenGLGst example. What are the best parts of both approaches, how can they be combined optimally and what should I add / change? Any last recommendations before I start programming a serious application?

Thanks in advance.


Best regards,
Dorfmeister


PS:
Sorry for the last two threads - they were intended to be simple posts instead, but obviously I shouldn't have changed the subject. They can be deleted as far am I'm concerned. Thanks for the helpful answers, though.

[benlaud]

2) I link OpenCV in my .pro by :

CONFIG += link_pkgconfig
PKGCONFIG += opencv

It could find the header and able to do auto complete for member function. However, it would depend on your setup. It make your software depends on a lot of package.

p.s My QT creator version is 1.3.84

3) I have already built an application on Maemo with OpenCV ,but the app do not process video. So can't compare what approach is better. But personally speaking , the functionity of highgui is too limited , I prefer to drop it and use system's utiltiy (gstreamer) for I/O stuff.

[divanov]

1) You can try profiling to see what is the bottleneck of the application. Normally optimisation discussion makes no sense before one has figures from profiling report.
2) pkg-config should be definitely a solution here
3) There is no point to combine SDL and Qt, you should choose one of them. GStreamer is pretty slow framework, but it gives you an abstraction API, which makes development easier.

[Dorfmeister]

Thanks for your answers. I really appreciate the tips, but opencv/cv.h is still not found. I tried to replace my stuff with the two lines, but had no success ad currently my src.pro file includes every useful library I'm aware of (based on Klen's .pro):

#-------------------------------------------------
#
# Project created by QtCreator 2010-06-10T16:24:32
#
#-------------------------------------------------

QT       += core gui opengl

TARGET = augmentedvision
TEMPLATE = app

CONFIG += link_pkgconfig mobility

######################################################################
#Could not link gtk+-2.0 with pkgconfig (Conflict with QtGui library)
######################################################################

PKGCONFIG += opencv \
             gstreamer-plugins-base-0.10 \
             gstreamer-interfaces-0.10 \
             gstreamer-0.10 dbus-1 \
             gstreamer-app-0.10 \
             gstreamer-plugins-bad-0.10

######################################################################
#Include gtk+-2.0 manually (QtGui conflict problem)
######################################################################
INCLUDEPATH +=. /usr/include/ \
                /usr/include/gtk-2.0/ \
                /usr/include/gtk-2.0/gtk/\
                /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/include \
                /usr/include/glib-2.0/ \
                                /usr/include/glib-2.0/glib/ \
                                /usr/include/glib-2.0/gio/ \
                                /usr/include/glib-2.0/gobject/ \
                /usr/include/atk-1.0/ \
                /usr/include/cairo/ \
                /usr/include/pango-1.0/ \
                /usr/lib/glib-2.0/include \
                /usr/include/opengl

# Since this didn't help I additional add the following, but to no avail:
INCLUDEPATH += /usr/include/opencv
LIBS          += -lcv -lhighgui

HEADERS += MyCameraWindow.h QOpenCVWidget.h
FORMS += mainwindow.ui
SOURCES += main.cpp \
           MyCameraWindow.cpp \
           QOpenCVWidget.cpp

MOBILITY = 

symbian {
    TARGET.UID3 = 0xe8689d1a
    # TARGET.CAPABILITY += 
    TARGET.EPOCSTACKSIZE = 0x14000
    TARGET.EPOCHEAPSIZE = 0x020000 0x800000
}

unix {
    #VARIABLES
    isEmpty(PREFIX) {
        PREFIX = /usr/local
    }

    BINDIR = $$PREFIX/bin
    DATADIR =$$PREFIX/share

    DEFINES += DATADIR=\"$$DATADIR\" PKGDATADIR=\"$$PKGDATADIR\"

    #MAKE INSTALL

    INSTALLS += target desktop scalable

    target.path =$$BINDIR

    desktop.path = $$DATADIR/applications/hildon
    desktop.files += ../data/$${TARGET}.desktop

    scalable.path = $$DATADIR/icons/hicolor/scalable/hildon
    scalable.files += ../data/scalable/$${TARGET}.png

}

It still doesn't find it, though. Any ideas?

Regarding point 3: I intuitively prefer Qt over SDL. If there are any objections, I'd be happy to hear them. Furthermore: If GStreamer is "pretty slow" - is there a better and faster solution available to get the video stream? Should OpenCV be faster, but just in this case is not?


Best regards,
Dorfmeister

EDIT:
Again, the manual scratchbox build works perfectly. Strange, isn't it?

[divanov]

Did you install libcv-dev?

[Dorfmeister]

I think so:

[sbox-FREMANTLE_ARMEL: ~/OwnProjects/OpenCV/augmentedvision/src] > apt-get install libcv-dev
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
libcv-dev is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 575 not upgraded

Btw: I use Qt Creator 1.3.83 based on Qt 4.7.0 (32 bit) built on Apr 22 2010 at 12:07:43 from the Qt SDK Beta on an updated Ubuntu developer VM. All opencv packages available except doc and python bindings should be installed inside Scratchbox.

EDIT:
Could anybody be so kind and try to compile my project with Qt Creator either with the original src.pro or with the one I just posted? It would be very helpful to know whether this problem only occurs on my system or whether it is a general problem. Thanks.

[divanov]

This link leads to file not found
http://www.zshare.net/download/771049800b033e35/
But I see a lot of problems in .pro file, which was posted there. There is no need to INCLUDEPATH and LIBS directly as it may cause a problem.
It's aslo not clear why mobility is semi-configured there.

[divanov]

I've modified packaging a bit and this version compiled for me without any problems.
http://www.mediafire.com/file/mnttid...nGL_V1.tar.bz2

[Dorfmeister]

Hi Daniil,

thanks for your suggestion. My problem, however, is exclusively OpenCV related: If I take your clean project and add

#include "opencv/cv.h"

to glwidget.cpp as well as \ opencv to PKGCONFIG in the .pro file I again have the same problem: It doesn't compile in QtCreator, but if I run

qmake DistanceQT.pro
make

manually in scratchbox it works just fine.

Any ideas?


Best regards,
Dorfmeister

[gnuton]

Did you check the build options and the target?

[benlaud]

Nokia Qt SDK can not use the library in scratchbox. You need to install those library to Nokia Qt SDK by yourself. I have tried to search document on web , but seems that nobody talk about this before. Therefore , I just extract those .deb to Nokia Qt Sdk. And it works.

e.g extract to NokiaQtSDK/Maemo/4.6.2/sysroot/fremantle-arm-sysroot-1014-slim

However, as OpenCV package depends on too many package , it need around 10 packages , and you need to fix the symbolic link.

Although I have made it work , it could build my app within Nokia Qt SDK. Finally , I have given up this approach as the final package depends on packages from extra-devel. It is quite troublesome for user. Now , I just build a static OpenCV that do not require ffmpeg. (p.s If you need to process video stuff , you still need to build with ffmpeg)

[Dorfmeister]

Thank you for this tip. Anything the Nokia guys have to say about this? Should we file a bug report about it? I guess I'll ditch QtCreator for now and simply compile my stuff manually. OpenCV is not properly supported and on device debugging with MADDE seems to have problems with camera applications as well. I'd really like Nokia to provide one functioning main way to develop Maemo applications. To have all those options is nice, but everywhere I go it seems like a construction side to me. Hopefully, the situation will improve with Meego, once the SDK has gold status.

[divanov]

Thank you for this tip. Anything the Nokia guys have to say about this? Should we file a bug report about it? I guess I'll ditch QtCreator for now and simply compile my stuff manually. OpenCV is not properly supported and on device debugging with MADDE seems to have problems with camera applications as well. I'd really like Nokia to provide one functioning main way to develop Maemo applications. To have all those options is nice, but everywhere I go it seems like a construction side to me. Hopefully, the situation will improve with Meego, once the SDK has gold status.

Nokia Qt SDK was made for Qt beginners and is not extendible. If you smart enough to be interested in OpenCV, then you are using scratchbox.

[pta0007]

I've modified packaging a bit and this version compiled for me without any problems.
http://www.mediafire.com/file/mnttid...nGL_V1.tar.bz2

Hi Daniil,

When I complied the project, I got

glwidget.cpp:216: error: 'glVertexAttribPointer' was not declared in this scope
glwidget.cpp:217: error: 'glEnableVertexAttribArray' was not declared in this scope
glwidget.cpp:221: error: 'glDisableVertexAttribArray' was not declared in this scope

It seems that the debugger cant find the OpenGL ES 2.0 function.

Even though I added

LIBS += -lGLESv2 -lQtOpenGL

into the .pro, it doesn't work.

What might be the problem?

[divanov]

Where did you compile it?