VisionLab Features Library
Andrea Vedaldi and Brian Fulkerson
ABOUT
The VLFeat open source library implements popular computer vision
algorithms including SIFT, MSER, k-means, hierarchical k-means,
agglomerative information bottleneck, and quick shift. It is written
in C for efficiency and compatibility, with interfaces in MATLAB for
ease of use, and detailed documentation throughout. It supports
Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
VLFeat is distributed under the BSD license (see the COPYING file).
Most of the documentation is available online at
http://www.vlfeat.org/index.html or compiled in HTML format in
`doc/index.html'.
INSTALLING
If you downloaded VLFeat binary package, installation is trivial.
The binaries are found in the `bin/ARCH' directory, where ARCH
depends on the architecture of your machine. VLFeat supports the
following ones out of the box:
ARCH MEXEXT DESCRIPTION
-----------------------------------------------
maci mexmaci Mac OS X Intel
maci64 mexmaci64 Mac OS X Intel (64 bit)
glnx86 mexglx GNU Linux
glnxa64 mexa64 GNU Linux (64 bit)
win32 mexw32 Windows
win64 mexw64 Windows (64 bit)
The `bin' directory contains also a copy of the VLFeat DLL (and of
the appropriate C runtime DLL in the case of Windows).
The VLFeat MATLAB toolbox can be found in the `toolbox'
directory. To use it with MATLAB, run the VL_SETUP command as
> cd VLFEATROOT/toolbox ; vl_setup
or
> run VLFEATROOT/toolbox/vl_setup
You can make this permanent by adding the line to MATLAB startup.m
file.
An HTML copy of the documentation can be found in `doc/index.html'. The
same documentation is available online at http://www.vlfeat.org/index.html.
COMPILING
If you downloaded VLFeat source package or just want to compile your
own version, all you need is a standard compiler setup.
UNIX. In Mac OS X and Linux you will need GNU GCC and GNU Make. In
fact, most C-90 compilers will do, although a few C-99 features are
used.
To compile MATLAB support, MATLAB should also be installed and the
MATLAB MEX command should be available from the command line.
In general, issuing
> make
should be enough to compile VLFeat. Type
> make help
or refer to http://www.vlfeat.org for further instructions.
WINDOWS. In Windows you will need Visual Studio 2008 or 2010.
VLFeat includes a Microsoft NMAKE Makefile (Makefile.mak). Open the
Visual C command prompty (make sure you run the 64 bit version if
your host is 64 bit), into the VLFeat directory and issue.
> nmake /f Makefile.mak ARCH=win32
or
> nmake /f Makefile.mak ARCH=win64
depending on your architecture.
CREATING THE DOCUMENTATION
Creating the documentation requires a UNIX platform (either Linux
or Mac OS X) and the following tools
- fig2dev (part of transfig)
- a modern LaTeX with
+ pdflatex
+ dvips
+ htlatex (possibily part of TeX4ht)
+ dvipng (possibily a separated package)
- doxygen (a recent version)
FIGURES. Figures are preprocessed by typing
> make -C doc/figures
However, you need to run MATLAB programs to generate most of the
figures to start with. To this end, load MATLAB and (provided that
everything is compiled and installed correctly) type
> vl_demo
TUTORIALS. To create the figures for the tutorials, issue
> make doc-deep
> make doc
SOURCE CODE DOCUMENTATION. To compile the source code documentation
issue
> make doc-api
The start of the documentation is the file `doc/index.html'.
APPENDIX
CODE COMPATIBILITY. In addition to the C-90 standard, the C compiler
is supposed to support the following common features:
- long int (64 bit integer) support
- variadic macro support
The SSE accelerated code requires the compiler to support Intel
intrisic. GCC and Visual C satisfy all the requirements.
CHANGES
0.9.14 Added SLIC superpixels and VL_ALPHANUM(). Improved
Windows binary package and added support for Visual
Studio 2010. Improved the documentation layout and added
a proper bibliography. Bugfixes and other minor
improvements. Moved from the GPL to the less restrictive
BSD license.
0.9.13 Fixes Windows binary package.
0.9.12 Fixes vl_compile and the architecture string on Linux 32 bit.
0.9.11 Fixes a compatibility problem on older Mac OS X versions.
A few bugfixes are included too.
0.9.10 Improves the homogeneous kernel map. Plenty of small tweaks
and improvements. Make maci64 the default architecture on
the Mac.
0.9.9 Added: sift matching example. Extended Caltech-101
classification example to use kd-trees.
0.9.8 Added: image distance transform, PEGASOS, floating point
K-means, homogeneous kernel maps, a Caltech-101
classification example. Improved documentation.
0.9.7 Changed the Mac OS X binary distribution to require
a less recent version of Mac OS X (10.5).
0.9.6 Changed the GNU/Linux binary distribution to require
a less recent version of the C library.
0.9.5 Added kd-tree and new SSE-accelerated vector/histogram
comparison code. Improved dense SIFT (dsift) implementation.
Added Snow Leopard and MATLAB R2009b support.
0.9.4 Added quick shift. Renamed dhog to dsift and improved
implementation and documentation. Improved tutorials.
Added 64 bit Windows binaries. Many other small changes.
0.9.3 Namespace change (everything begins with a vl_ prefix
now). Many other changes to provide compilation support
on Windows with MATLAB 7.
beta-3 Completions to the ikmeans code.
beta-2 Many completions.
beta-1 Initial public release.