Setting Up OpenCV and .lib files

Question

I have been trying to set up OpenCV for the past few days with no results. I am using Windows 7 and VS C++ 2008 express edition. I have downloaded and installed OpenCV 2.1 and some of the examples work. I downloaded CMake and ran it to generate the VS project files and built all of them but there with several errors, and couldn't get any farther than that.

When I ran CMake I configured it to use the VS 9 compiler, and then it brought up a list of items in red such as BUILD_EXAMPLES, BUILD_LATEX_DOCS, ect. All of them were unchecked except BUILD_NEW_PYTHON_SUPPORT, BUILD_TESTS, ENABLE_OPENMP, and OPENCV_BUILD_3RDPARTY_LIBS. I configured and generate without changing anything and then it generated the VS files such as ALL_BUILD.vcproj. I built the OpenCV VS solution in debug mode and it had 15 failures (maybe this is part of the problem or is it because I don't have python and stuff like that?)

Now there was a lib folder created after building but inside there was just this VC++ Minimum Rebuild Dependency file and Program Debug Database file, both called cvhaartraining. I believe it should have created the .lib files I need instead of this. Also, the bin folder now has a folder called Debug with the same types of files with names like cv200d and cvaux200d.

Believe I need those .lib files to move forward.

I would also greatly appreciate if someone could direct me to a reliable tutorial to set up VS for OpenCV because I have been reading a lot of tutorials and they all say different things such as some say to configure Window's environment variables and other say files are located in folders such as OpenCV/cv which I don't have. I have gotten past the point of clear headed thinking so if anyone could offer some direction or a simple list of the files I need to link then I would be thankful.

Also a side question: why when linking the OpenCV libs do you have to put them in quotes?

Answer 1

If you're just getting started, you should probably grab the prebuilt libraries for OpenCV instead. It's OpenCV-2.1.0-win32-vs2008.exe from this page.

Once you have that, there is really no setup. Just link to the (already built) lib files in any VS project you create, and make sure the OpenCV include directory is in the projects include path.