Installing OpenCV on Mac OS X, with Python Bindings. So I thought I'd document the process to get started using vision algorithms on a Mac. Platform: OS X Version 10.5.8 1. Install XCode from the Mac OS X install CD. Download and install MacPorts, a command-line tool to install software and deal with dependencies for you. Installing OpenCV on Mac UPDATE: Mavericks users were likely frustrated for the last few weeks trying to install OpenCV. It appears the problem has been fixed, and these instructions should work without issue. How to install and create OpenCV project on Mac OSX with XCode. To start with you may download latest or stable version of opencv from here and choose OpenCV for Linux/Mac. Besides, you also need to install CMake prior to installing OpenCV package.

In this post, we will provide step by step instructions for installing OpenCV 3.3.0 (C++ and Python) on MacOS and OSX.

Step 1: Install XCode

Install XCode from App Store.

If XCode available on App Store is not compatible with your OS:

1. Find XCode version compatible to your OS from this table https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Xcode#Version_comparison_table
2. Go to this webpage https://developer.apple.com/download/more/
   • Login if you have apple developer account else create your account and login.
   • Search for xcode and download the version compatible to your OS.
3. Install XCode.
4. After installation open XCode, and accept xcode-build license when it asks.

Step 2: Install Homebrew

Launch a terminal from Launchpad. From this step onward, all commands will be run in the terminal.

Step 3: Install Python 2 and Python 3

Python version (2.6 or 2.7, 3.5 or 3.6) installed on your machine is required to determine path of Python’s site-packages. It will be used later.

NOTE : Recently Homebrew made some changes in Python formula. Earlier homebrew used to install python2 as /usr/local/bin/python. Now it follows these rules:

1. Install python2 at /usr/local/bin/python2
2. Install python3 at /usr/local/bin/python3
3. python command will point to /usr/bin/python. This is the python distribution which comes with your OS and not installed by Homebrew.

We want to use Python installed by Homebrew because it makes installing/managing packages easier. To run python scripts you should run command python2 and python3 for Python 2 & 3 respectively. If you find this annoying and want to use command python to run python2, add following line to ~/.bash_profile.

This step is recommended not just for this course but in general to keep the python installation clean.

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Step 4: Install Python libraries in a Virtual Environment

We will use Virtual Environment to install Python libraries. It is generally a good practice in order to separate your project environment and global environment.

Step 5: Install OpenCV

Step 5.1 : Compile & Install OpenCV

Note: Homebrew recently moved many popular formulae to homebrew-core.
Earlier you can install OpenCV 2 using formula name opencv and OpenCV 3 using formula name opencv3.
They have now renamed opencv3 to opencv and opencv to [email protected]
Various options such as –with-qt, –with-tbb etc are also removed in the updated formula and CUDA support is also dropped.
You can check these github issues 15853, 6126, 16640, 5996
to read more about it.

Homebrew has also made it compulsory to compile and install Python bindings for both Python 2 and Python 3. So if you don’t have Python 3 installed, Homebrew will install it while installing opencv.

Step 5.2 : Add OpenCV’s site-packages path to global site-packages

When brew is done compiling and installing OpenCV3, we will update path of site-packages directory which contains cv2.so file to Homebrew Python’s site-packages directory. Depending upon the Python version you have (2.6/2.7 or 3.5/3.6) these paths would be different.

Step 6: Make OpenCV3 Python symlink in our virtual environment

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Path to OpenCV’s Python library will be different depending upon which Python version you have. Double check the exact path and filename on your machine. Use this command to find out the path on your machine.

Step 7: Test OpenCV3

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Now you can exit from Python virtual environment.

Now whenever you are going to run Python scripts which use OpenCV you have to activate the virtual environment we created using workon command.

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