These instructions explain how to compile VLFeat from sources. While this is necessary in order to develop or modify VLFeat, using the pre-compiled binaries will work in most other cases.
VLFeat is largely self-contained and hence easy to compile. While certain features such as multi-core computation and vector instruction support may require specific compilers, most compilers and environments should be capable of producing fully functional version of the library. Compiling MATLAB or Octave support requires the corresponding applications to be installed too.
Compiling for UNIX-like platforms (e.g. GNU/Linux, Mac OS X) assumes that the standard GNU toolchain is available. In particular, while compilers other than GCC can be used, the compilation scripts require GNU/make.
To compile the library, it is usually sufficient to change to
VLFeat root directory, denoted VLFEATROOT
in the
following, and type make
:
The make script attempts to automatically detect the host architecture and configure itself accordingly. If the architecture is not detected correctly, it can be specified manually. For instance
compiles for GNU/Linux 32-bit. make help
can be used
to obtain a list of other useful options. You can also use make
info
to obtain a list of the configuration parameters used by
the Makefile, which might allow you do debug any potential issue.
In order for MATLAB support to be compiled, the
MATLAB mex
script must be in the current path. If it is
not, its location must be passed to make
as
follows. First, determine MATLAB's root directory by running a MATLAB
session and issuing the matlabroot
command. Let MATLABROOT
denote the returned path
(e.g. /Applications/MATLAB_R2009b.app/
). The mex
script is usually located in MALTABROOT/bin/mex
. Then run
the compilation with the command
VLFeat must be compiled for the architecture used by MATLAB (run
MATLAB's computer
command to obtain this information). On
Mac OS X it is often necessary to turn on 64-bit support explicitly by
setting ARCH=maci64
as both the 32 and 64 bit versions
are plausible targets on 64-bit machines.
Octave support is still experimental. Similarly to MATLAB, Octave
requires compiling MEX files. This can be turned on by passing to make
the path to the mkoctfile
command:
Since macOS CLang compiler does not support OpenMP, this is disabled by default on this platform. To use it, install Brew llvm:
Then, use the Brew CLang compiler to compile VLFeat, as follows::
Here BREWROOT
is the path to Brew installation.
For Windows, the library bundles an NMake makefile
(Makefile.mak
). In order to use it, you must edit
Makefile.mak to adjust the values of a number of configuration
variables to match your setup. Once you have done that, start the
Visual Studio Command Prompt and type
For Windows platform, it is also possible to compile just the
MATLAB MEX files from within MATLAB (using the vl_compile
command). This is meant to help less experienced users that may need
to recompile the mex file due to binary incompatibilities with older
MATLAB versions.
Use nmake /f Makefile.mak
.
Without /f
, nmake will default to the wrong
makefile.
This error is usually caused by attempting to compile outside of the Visual Studio Command Prompt.