Here, you'll learn how to compile ICL on your system.

Supported Platforms

Currently, we only support linux as plattform, however, we plan to provide mac and windows compatibility soon. We use cmake and standard C++ only. Therefore porting ICL to other platforms will be quite easy.

Optional Dependencies (Short)

In order to get the most out of ICL, you should first install all available external dependencies. Please note that all external dependencies are purely optional.
The main optional external dependecies are:

• Intel Integrated Performance Primitives Intel (IPP)
• Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL)
• Open Source Computer Vision (OpenCV)
• opensurf
• libmesasr
• libdc1394-2
• pylon-2.3.3
• OpenNI
• Qt

Please find a more detailed list of external dependencies at the bottom of this page.

Step By Step Installation of Dependencies

First, you'll have to care about installing the decencies for your ICL build.
Even though ICL has no compulsory dependencies, it is strongly recommended to install some of them to reveal ICL's full potential (E.g. you will not be able to use ICL's wonderful GUI toolkit if you build it without Qt support). A detailed step by step description for installing the dependencies is given at

Installation Guide for 3rd Party Dependencies.

Building ICL

First start with getting the current ICL Version from svn:

ICL uses CMake as build system. CMake is a cross platform makefile generator.
If you need a newer version of cmake refer to:
cmake.org.

Please note: Before you can build ICL with all desired functionalities, you might have to install some extra dependencies (as explained above).

We strongly recommend to use the configure script, that is placed in ICL's root directory. 'configure' always gets a single parameter that defines a configuration file name. A sample configuration file 'configure-sample-file.cfg' is also placed in ICL's root directory. The configuration file is documented and has a very simple syntax. Basically, you can simply define all build-dependent variables here. You can start the configuration process by calling

This will parse your configuration file and show you a summary of all parsed variables. Finally, the script calls cmake automatically and lists the dependencies that are found and used. The project can be build then by going into the build directory (which is usually ./build/release or ./build/debug) and typing

Alternatively, you can use cmake, ccmake or cmake-gui in order to configure the ICL-build. Here, you can manually specify all necessary variables for the build such as the installation prefix and the source directory for certain dependencies (some details are given here). However, as mentioned above, we do not recommend this, because of the huge amount of variables that can be edited there.

Experimental Windows build instructions

Step by step instructions

Optional Dependencies (Detailed)

ICL has only optional software dependencies, however some special functionalities depend compulsorily on certain 3rd party libraries. In the following, dependent functions, classes and packages are listed:

Intel Integrated Performance Primitives (Intel IPP)

Intel Math Kernel Library (Intel MKL)

libdc1394

OpenCV

OpenGL

Qt

Unicap

libMagick++

libjpeg

libpng

libz

videodev.h

SVS

libXine

XCF-Framework

libfreenect

pylon

OpenNI