New opencv builds

Posted 27 September 2018 by Ben Nuttall

The opencv maintainers don’t release source distribution for the packages, so Dave has been building Raspberry Pi wheels manually from source on GitHub. They have also chosen to split releases into four separate pacakges:

• opencv-python
• opencv-python-headless
• opencv-contrib-python
• opencv-contrib-python-headless

opencv-contrib includes all of opencv, plus additional modules (listed in the opencv docs). The -headless releases exclude any GUI functionality, which mean they require fewer dependencies, and are ideal if you’re using Raspbian Lite or simply not using any GUI features.

We now have Raspberry Pi wheels for versions 3.4.2.16, 3.4.2.17 and 3.4.3.18 of all four package variations on piwheels.org.

Dependencies

When you pip install an opencv package, you’ll need various apt packages installed to provide make it work. We’re planning to document this on piwheels.org for each package in future but for now, here are the full installation instructions for opencv:

opencv-python

sudo apt install libatlas3-base libwebp6 libtiff5 libjasper1 libilmbase12 libopenexr22 libilmbase12 libgstreamer1.0-0 libavcodec57 libavformat57 libavutil55 libswscale4 libqtgui4 libqt4-test libqtcore4
sudo pip3 install opencv-python

opencv-python-headless

sudo apt install libatlas3-base libwebp6 libtiff5 libjasper1 libilmbase12 libopenexr22 libilmbase12 libgstreamer1.0-0 libavcodec57 libavformat57 libavutil55 libswscale4 libgtk-3-0 libpangocairo-1.0-0 libpango-1.0-0 libatk1.0-0 libcairo-gobject2 libcairo2 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0
sudo pip3 install opencv-python-headless

opencv-contrib-python

sudo apt install libatlas3-base libsz2 libharfbuzz0b libtiff5 libjasper1 libilmbase12 libopenexr22 libilmbase12 libgstreamer1.0-0 libavcodec57 libavformat57 libavutil55 libswscale4 libqtgui4 libqt4-test libqtcore4
sudo pip3 install opencv-contrib-python libwebp6

opencv-contrib-python-headless

sudo apt install libatlas3-base libhdf5-100 libharfbuzz0b libwebp6 libtiff5 libjasper1 libilmbase12 libopenexr22 libgstreamer1.0-0 libavcodec57 libavformat57 libavutil55 libswscale4 libgtk-3-0 libpangocairo-1.0-0 libpango-1.0-0 libatk1.0-0 libcairo-gobject2 libcairo2 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0
sudo pip3 install opencv-contrib-python-headless