SimpleCV: traceback errors when opening Display()

Question

So... fully up to date version of Ubuntu 13.04 on my laptop (Lenovo ThinkPad T530), downloaded the SimpleCV 1.3 superpack .deb file and installed it. When I open up an interactive interpreter, either regular python 2.7 or ipython, I get various errors as shown below:

In [1]: from SimpleCV import Camera, Display, Image
In [2]: cam = Camera()
VIDIOC_QUERYMENU: Invalid argument
VIDIOC_QUERYMENU: Invalid argument
VIDIOC_QUERYMENU: Invalid argument
VIDIOC_QUERYMENU: Invalid argument
VIDIOC_QUERYMENU: Invalid argument
VIDIOC_QUERYMENU: Invalid argument
VIDIOC_QUERYMENU: Invalid argument

In [3]: display = Display()
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
IOError                                   Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-3-026b8c705ca8> in <module>()
----> 1 display = Display()

/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/SimpleCV/Display.pyc in __init__(self, resolution, flags, title, displaytype, headless)
    156         if not displaytype == 'notebook':
    157             self.screen = pg.display.set_mode(resolution, flags)
--> 158         scvLogo = SimpleCV.Image("simplecv").scale(32,32)
    159         pg.display.set_icon(scvLogo.getPGSurface())
    160         if flags != pg.FULLSCREEN and flags != pg.NOFRAME:

/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/SimpleCV/ImageClass.pyc in __init__(self, source, camera, colorSpace, verbose, sample, cv2image)
    785                     self._bitmap = cv.LoadImage(self.filename, iscolor=cv.CV_LOAD_IMAGE_COLOR)
    786                 except:
--> 787                     self._pil = pil.open(self.filename).convert("RGB")
    788                     self._bitmap = cv.CreateImageHeader(self._pil.size, cv.IPL_DEPTH_8U, 3)
    789                     cv.SetData(self._bitmap, self._pil.tostring())

/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PIL/Image.pyc in open(fp, mode)
   1986     if isStringType(fp):
   1987         filename = fp
-> 1988         fp = builtins.open(fp, "rb")
   1989     else:
   1990         filename = ""

IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/SimpleCV/sampleimages/simplecv.png'

In [4]:

...as well as a blank (black) pygame window. It looks like all of this goes back to one missing .png file?!?

I also tried manually installing from git (after manually installing the dependencies listed) and ran into other problems.

It doesn't seem like it should be this hard to get this up and running?!?

Any ideas or suggestions welcome.

TIA,

Monte

Answer 1

I had the same problem on Ubuntu 12.04. My SimpleCV would break with the Hello World example. The bug is known and seems to be resolved since the 1.3 Superpack was made. Open a terminal and use this code found on the git page https://github.com/sightmachine/simplecv

#Install the latest SimpleCV from source on Ubuntu Linux
sudo apt-get install ipython python-opencv python-scipy python-numpy python-pygame python-setuptools git
git clone https://github.com/sightmachine/SimpleCV.git
cd SimpleCV/
sudo pip install -r requirements.txt
sudo python setup.py install

For simplicity, I would suggest copying all of this into a bash script saved as "InstallSimpleCV.sh" into your home directory. Run the script with this line:
sudo sh InstallSimpleCV.sh

And you should not trust code you find on the web that you don't understand. If you don't understand the code, you can verify my pasted code from the link.