ROpenCVLite is a utility package
that installs OpenCV within R
for use by other packages. This package is not a wrapper around OpenCV
(it does not provide access to OpenCV functions in R),
not is it a computer vision package for R. All
it does is compiling and installing OpenCV within your
R installation so that other packages can easily
find it and compile against it.
OpenCV is one of the most - if not the most - popular
and efficient open-source computer vision library available today. If you want
to develop fast video processing software or implement real time computer vision
algorithms, you pretty much have to use OpenCV nowadays.
Why is ROpenCVLite necessary?
There are no computer vision package available for R
currently. There are some very good image processing packages (see
imager for instance) but none of them can
handle fast processing of large videos.
The goal of ROpenCVLite is to
promote the development of efficient computer vision packages for R
based on OpenCV. ROpenCVLite
facilitates the installation of OpenCV in a convenient
location for other packages to find it and compile against it.
Couldn't you just ship OpenCV's binaries with your package?
Yes, but... it is fairly difficult to ship binary files compiled against
OpenCV that will work for sure on someone else's computer.
It is not OpenCV's fault; it is because there are so many
video formats and standards for peripherals out there that nobody can be certain
what interfaces and libraries will be available on anyone's computer to grab
images from videos and camera streams. The least worst solution for developers
is therefore to make sure that there is a copy of OpenCV
on each user's computer that has been compiled taking into account the
specificities of said computer.
HOWEVER...
OpenCV is notoriously difficult to compile and install
from scratch, especially for people without experience with low level languages.
This is where ROpenCVLite come into
play. This package tries as much as possible to cleanly compile OpenCV
and to install it in a standardized location that all R
package developers can easily find.
ROpenCVLite compiles and installs
the core modules of the OpenCV library but does not
compile or install its contributed extra modules.
This is to reduce the compilation time (which is already long enough) and also
because most of these extra modules are (1) too specific for most applications of
OpenCV, and (2) they do not always compile nicely.
We will work toward providing a mechanism to install the extra modules, but this is not part of our immediate plans.