OpenEB is the open source project associated with Metavision SDK
It enables anyone to get a better understanding of event-based vision, directly interact with events and build their own applications or camera plugins. As a camera manufacturer, ensure your customers benefit from the most advanced event-based software suite available by building your own plugin. As a creator, scientist, academic, join and contribute to the fast-growing event-based vision community.
OpenEB is composed of the Open modules of Metavision SDK:
- HAL: Hardware Abstraction Layer to operate any event-based vision device.
- Base: Foundations and common definitions of event-based applications.
- Core: Generic algorithms for visualization, event stream manipulation, applicative pipeline generation.
- Core ML: Generic functions for Machine Learning, event_to_video and video_to_event pipelines.
- Driver: High-level abstraction built on the top of HAL to easily interact with event-based cameras.
- UI: Viewer and display controllers for event-based data.
OpenEB also contains the source code of Prophesee camera plugins, enabling to stream data from our event-based cameras and to read recordings of event-based data. The supported cameras are:
- EVK2 - HD
- EVK3 - VGA/320/HD
- EVK4 - HD
This document describes how to compile and install the OpenEB codebase. For further information, refer to our online documentation where you will find some tutorials to get you started in C++ or Python, some samples to discover how to use our API and a more detailed description of our modules and packaging.
Compilation and execution were tested on platforms that meet the following requirements:
- Linux: Ubuntu 20.04 or 22.04 64-bit
- Architecture: amd64 (a.k.a. x64)
- Graphic card with support of OpenGL 3.0 minimum
- CPU with support of AVX2
Compilation on other platforms (alternate Linux distributions, different versions of Ubuntu, ARM processor architecture etc.) was not tested. For those platforms some adjustments to this guide or to the code itself may be required.
If you are upgrading OpenEB from a previous version, you should first read carefully the Release Notes as some changes may impact your usage of our SDK (e.g. API updates) and cameras (e.g. firmware update might be necessary).
Then, you need to clean your system from previously installed Prophesee software. If after a previous compilation, you chose to
deploy the Metavision files in your system path, then go to the build
folder in the source code directory and
launch the following command to remove those files:
sudo make uninstall
In addition, make a global check in your system paths (/usr/lib
, /usr/local/lib
, /usr/include
, /usr/local/include
)
and in your environment variables (PATH
, PYTHONPATH
and LD_LIBRARY_PATH
) to remove occurrences of Prophesee or Metavision files.
Install the following dependencies:
sudo apt update
sudo apt -y install apt-utils build-essential software-properties-common wget unzip curl git cmake
sudo apt -y install libopencv-dev libboost-all-dev libusb-1.0-0-dev libprotobuf-dev protobuf-compiler
sudo apt -y install libhdf5-dev hdf5-tools libglew-dev libglfw3-dev libcanberra-gtk-module ffmpeg
Optionally, if you want to run the tests, you need to install Google Gtest and Gmock packages. For more details, see Google Test User Guide:
sudo apt -y install libgtest-dev libgmock-dev
For the Python API, you will need Python and some additional libraries. If Python is not available on your system, install it We support Python 3.8 and 3.9 on Ubuntu 20.04 and Python 3.9 and 3.10 on Ubuntu 22.04. If you want to use other versions of Python, some source code modifications will be necessary
Then install pip
and some Python libraries:
sudo apt -y install python3-pip python3-distutils
sudo apt -y install python3.X-dev # where X is 8, 9 or 10 depending on your Python version (3.8, 3.9 or 3.10)
python3 -m pip install pip --upgrade
python3 -m pip install "opencv-python==4.5.5.64" "sk-video==1.1.10" "fire==0.4.0" "numpy==1.23.4" "h5py==3.7.0" pandas scipy
python3 -m pip install jupyter jupyterlab matplotlib "ipywidgets==7.6.5" pytest command_runner
The Python bindings of the C++ API rely on the pybind11 library, specifically version 2.6.0.
Note that pybind11 is required only if you want to use the Python bindings of the C++ API .
You can opt out of creating these bindings by passing the argument -DCOMPILE_PYTHON3_BINDINGS=OFF
at step 3 during compilation (see below).
In that case, you will not need to install pybind11, but you won't be able to use our Python interface to the C++ API.
Unfortunately, there is no pre-compiled version of pybind11 available, so you need to install it manually:
wget https://github.com/pybind/pybind11/archive/v2.6.0.zip
unzip v2.6.0.zip
cd pybind11-2.6.0/
mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -DPYBIND11_TEST=OFF
cmake --build .
sudo cmake --build . --target install
To use Machine Learning features, you need to install some additional dependencies.
First, if you have some Nvidia hardware with GPUs, you can optionally install CUDA (11.6 or 11.7) and cuDNN to leverage them with pytorch and libtorch.
Make sure that you install a version of CUDA that is compatible with your GPUs by checking Nvidia compatibility page.
Note that, at the moment, we don't support OpenCL and AMD GPUs.
Then, you need to install PyTorch 1.13.1. Retrieve and execute the pip command of version 1.13.1 from the previous versions install guide section.
Then install some extra Python libraries:
python3 -m pip install "numba==0.56.3" "profilehooks==1.12.0" "pytorch_lightning==1.8.6" "tqdm==4.63.0" "kornia==0.6.8"
- Retrieve the code:
git clone https://github.com/prophesee-ai/openeb.git --branch 4.6.2
. (If you choose to download an archive of OpenEB from GitHub rather than cloning the repository, you need to ensure that you select aFull.Source.Code.*
archive instead of using the automatically generatedSource.Code.*
archives. This is because the latter do not include a necessary submodule.) - Create and open the build directory in the
openeb
folder (absolute path to this directory is calledOPENEB_SRC_DIR
in next sections):cd openeb; mkdir build && cd build
- Generate the makefiles using CMake:
cmake .. -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF
. If you want to specify to cmake which version of Python to consider, you should use the option-DPython3_EXECUTABLE=<path_to_python_to_use>
. This is useful, for example, when you have a more recent version of Python than the ones we support installed on your system. In that case, cmake would select it and compilation might fail. - Compile:
cmake --build . --config Release -- -j 4
Once the compilation is finished, you have two options: you can choose to work directly from the build
folder
or you can deploy the OpenEB files in the system path (/usr/local/lib
, /usr/local/include
...).
-
Option 1 - working from
build
folder-
To use OpenEB directly from the
build
folder, you need to update some environment variables using this script (which you may add to your~/.bashrc
to make it permanent):source utils/scripts/setup_env.sh
-
Prophesee camera plugins are included in OpenEB, but you still need to copy the udev rules files in the system path and reload them so that your camera is detected with this command:
sudo cp <OPENEB_SRC_DIR>/hal_psee_plugins/resources/rules/*.rules /etc/udev/rules.d sudo udevadm control --reload-rules sudo udevadm trigger
-
-
Option 2 - deploying in the system path
-
To deploy OpenEB, launch the following command:
sudo cmake --build . --target install
Note that you can also deploy the OpenEB files (applications, samples, libraries etc.) in a directory of your choice by using the
CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX
variable (-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<OPENEB_INSTALL_DIR>
) when generating the makefiles in step 3. Similarly, you can configure the directory where the Python packages will be deployed using thePYTHON3_SITE_PACKAGES
variable (-DPYTHON3_SITE_PACKAGES=<PYTHON3_PACKAGES_INSTALL_DIR>
). -
you also need to update
LD_LIBRARY_PATH
andHDF5_PLUGIN_PATH
(which you may add to your~/.bashrc
to make it permanent):export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/lib export HDF5_PLUGIN_PATH=$HDF5_PLUGIN_PATH:/usr/local/lib/hdf5/plugin # On Ubuntu 20.04 export HDF5_PLUGIN_PATH=$HDF5_PLUGIN_PATH:/usr/local/hdf5/lib/plugin # On Ubuntu 22.04
-
Note that if you are using a third-party camera, you need to install the plugin provided
by the camera vendor and specify the location of the plugin using the MV_HAL_PLUGIN_PATH
environment variable.
To get started with OpenEB, you can download some sample recordings and visualize them with metavision_viewer or you can stream data from your Prophesee-compatible event-based camera.
Running the test suite is a sure-fire way to ensure you did everything well with your compilation and installation process.
-
Download the files necessary to run the tests. Click
Download
on the top right folder. Beware of the size of the obtained archive which weighs around 1.2 Gb. -
Extract and put the content of this archive to
<OPENEB_SRC_DIR>/datasets
. For instance, the correct path of sequencegen31_timer.raw
should be<OPENEB_SRC_DIR>/datasets/openeb/gen31_timer.raw
. -
Regenerate the makefiles with the test options enabled:
cd <OPENEB_SRC_DIR>/build
cmake .. -DBUILD_TESTING=ON
-
Compile again.
cmake --build . --config Release -- -j 4
-
Finally, run the test suite:
ctest --verbose
Currently, we support only Windows 10. Compilation on other versions of Windows was not tested. For those platforms some adjustments to this guide or to the code itself may be required.
If you are upgrading OpenEB from a previous version, you should first read carefully the Release Notes as some changes may impact your usage of our SDK (e.g. API updates) and cameras (e.g. firmware update might be necessary).
Then, if you have previously installed any Prophesee's software, you will need to uninstall it first.
Remove the folders where you installed Metavision artifacts (check both the build
folder of the source code and
C:\Program Files\Prophesee
which is the default install path of the deployment step).
Some steps of this procedure don't work on FAT32 and exFAT file system. Hence, make sure that you are using a NTFS file system before going further.
You must enable the support for long paths:
- Hit the Windows key, type gpedit.msc and press Enter
- Navigate to Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Filesystem
- Double-click the "Enable Win32 long paths" option, select the "Enabled" option and click "OK"
To compile OpenEB, you will need to install some extra tools:
- install git
- install CMake 3.21
- install Microsoft C++ compiler (64-bit). You can choose one of the following solutions:
- For building only, you can install MS Build Tools (free, part of Windows 10 SDK package)
- Download and run "Build tools for Visual Studio 2022" installer
- Select "C++ build tools", make sure Windows 10 SDK is checked, and add English Language Pack
- For development, you can also download and run Visual Studio Installer
- For building only, you can install MS Build Tools (free, part of Windows 10 SDK package)
- install vcpkg that will be used for installing dependencies:
- download and extract vcpkg version 2023.11.20
cd <VCPKG_SRC_DIR>
bootstrap-vcpkg.bat
- install the libraries by running
vcpkg.exe install --triplet x64-windows libusb boost opencv dirent gtest glew glfw3 hdf5[cpp,threadsafe,tools,zlib]
- Finally, download and install ffmpeg and add the
bin
directory to your PATH.
Note that if you are using vcpkg for various projects or multiple versions of OpenEB, you might want to optimize the number of vcpkg install you manage. To do so, you will need the versions of the libraries we require. Those can be found in the vcpkg repository but we list them here for convenience:
- libusb: 1.0.26
- boost: 1.83.0
- opencv: 4.8.0
- dirent: 1.24.0
- gtest: 1.14.0
- glew: 2.2.0
- glfw3: 3.3.8
- hdf5: 1.14.2
- Download "Windows x86-64 executable installer" for one of these Python versions:
- Add Python install and script directories in your
PATH
and make sure they are listed before theWindowsApps
folder which contains a Python alias launching the Microsoft Store. So, if you installed Python 3.8 in the default path, your userPATH
should contain those three lines in that order:
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python38
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python38\Scripts
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps
Then install pip
and some Python libraries:
python -m pip install pip --upgrade
python -m pip install "opencv-python==4.5.5.64" "sk-video==1.1.10" "fire==0.4.0" "numpy==1.23.4" "h5py==3.7.0" pandas scipy
python -m pip install jupyter jupyterlab matplotlib "ipywidgets==7.6.5" pytest command_runner
The Python bindings of the C++ API rely on the pybind11 library.
You should install pybind using vcpkg in order to get the appropriate version: vcpkg.exe install --triplet x64-windows pybind11
Note that pybind11 is required only if you plan to use the Python bindings of the C++ API.
You can opt out of creating these bindings by passing the argument -DCOMPILE_PYTHON3_BINDINGS=OFF
at step 2 during compilation (see section "Compilation using CMake").
In that case, you will not need to install pybind11, but you won't be able to use our Python interface to the C++ API.
To use Machine Learning features, you need to install some additional dependencies.
First, if you have some Nvidia hardware with GPUs, you can optionally install CUDA (11.6 or 11.7) and cuDNN to leverage them with pytorch and libtorch.
Then, you need to install PyTorch 1.13.1. Retrieve and execute the pip command of version 1.13.1 from the previous versions install guide section.
Then install some extra Python libraries:
python -m pip install "numba==0.56.3" "profilehooks==1.12.0" "pytorch_lightning==1.8.6" "tqdm==4.63.0" "kornia==0.6.8"
First, retrieve the codebase:
git clone https://github.com/prophesee-ai/openeb.git --branch 4.6.2
Note that if you choose to download an archive of OpenEB from GitHub rather than cloning the repository,
you need to ensure that you select a Full.Source.Code.*
archive instead of using
the automatically generated Source.Code.*
archives. This is because the latter do not include
a necessary submodule.
Open a command prompt inside the openeb
folder (absolute path to this directory is called OPENEB_SRC_DIR
in next sections) and do as follows:
- Create and open the build directory, where temporary files will be created:
mkdir build && cd build
- Generate the makefiles using CMake:
cmake .. -A x64 -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=<OPENEB_SRC_DIR>\cmake\toolchains\vcpkg.cmake -DVCPKG_DIRECTORY=<VCPKG_SRC_DIR>
. Note that the value passed to the parameter-DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE
must be an absolute path, not a relative one. - Compile:
cmake --build . --config Release --parallel 4
Once the compilation is done, you have two options: you can choose to work directly from the build
folder
or you can deploy the OpenEB files (applications, samples, libraries etc.) in a directory of your choice.
-
Option 1 - working from
build
folder-
To use OpenEB directly from the
build
folder, you need to update some environment variables using this script:utils\scripts\setup_env.bat
-
-
Option 2 - deploying in a directory of your choice
-
To deploy OpenEB in the default folder (
C:\Program Files\Prophesee
), execute this command (your console should be launched as an administrator):cmake --build . --config Release --target install
-
To deploy OpenEB in another folder, you should generate the solution again (step 2 above) with the additional variable
CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX
having the value of your target folder (OPENEB_INSTALL_DIR
).Similarly, to specify where the Python packages will be deployed (
PYTHON3_PACKAGES_INSTALL_DIR
), you should use thePYTHON3_SITE_PACKAGES
variable.Here is an example of a command customizing those two folders:
cmake .. -A x64 -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=<OPENEB_SRC_DIR>\cmake\toolchains\vcpkg.cmake -DVCPKG_DIRECTORY=<VCPKG_SRC_DIR> -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<OPENEB_INSTALL_DIR> -DPYTHON3_SITE_PACKAGES=<PYTHON3_PACKAGES_INSTALL_DIR> -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF
After this command, you should launch the actual compilation and installation of OpenEB (your console should be launched as an administrator):
cmake --build . --config Release --parallel 4 cmake --build . --config Release --target install
-
You also need to manually edit some environment variables:
- append
<OPENEB_INSTALL_DIR>\bin
toPATH
(C:\Program Files\Prophesee\bin
if you used default configuration) - append
<OPENEB_INSTALL_DIR>\lib\metavision\hal\plugins
toMV_HAL_PLUGIN_PATH
(C:\Program Files\Prophesee\lib\metavision\hal\plugins
if you used default configuration) - append
<OPENEB_INSTALL_DIR>\lib\hdf5\plugin
toHDF5_PLUGIN_PATH
(C:\Program Files\Prophesee\lib\hdf5\plugin
if you used default configuration) - append
<PYTHON3_PACKAGES_INSTALL_DIR>
toPYTHONPATH
(not needed if you used default configuration)
- append
-
Open a command prompt inside the openeb
folder (absolute path to this directory is called OPENEB_SRC_DIR
in next sections) and do as follows:
- Create and open the build directory, where temporary files will be created:
mkdir build && cd build
- Generate the Visual Studio files using CMake:
cmake .. -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" -A x64 -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=<OPENEB_SRC_DIR>\cmake\toolchains\vcpkg.cmake -DVCPKG_DIRECTORY=<VCPKG_SRC_DIR>
(adapt to your Visual Studio version). Note that the value passed to the parameter-DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE
must be an absolute path, not a relative one. - Open the solution file
metavision.sln
, select theRelease
configuration and build theALL_BUILD
project.
Once the compilation is done, you can choose to work directly from the build
folder
or you can deploy the OpenEB files (applications, samples, libraries etc.) in a directory of your choice.
-
Option 1 - working from the
build
folder- To use OpenEB directly from the
build
folder, you need to update the environment variables as done in the scriptutils\scripts\setup_env.bat
- To use OpenEB directly from the
-
Option 2 - deploying OpenEB
- To deploy OpenEB, you need to build the
INSTALL
project. By default, files will be deployed inC:\Program Files\Prophesee
- To deploy OpenEB, you need to build the
Prophesee camera plugins are included in OpenEB, but you need to install the drivers for the cameras to be available on Windows. To do so, follow this procedure:
- download wdi-simple.exe from our file server
- execute the following commands in a Command Prompt launched as an administrator:
wdi-simple.exe -n "EVK" -m "Prophesee" -v 0x04b4 -p 0x00f4
wdi-simple.exe -n "EVK" -m "Prophesee" -v 0x04b4 -p 0x00f5
wdi-simple.exe -n "EVK" -m "Prophesee" -v 0x04b4 -p 0x00f3
If you own an EVK2 or an RDK2, there are a few additional steps to complete that are detailed in our online documentation in the Camera Plugin section of the OpenEB install guide.
If you are using a third-party camera, you need to follow the instructions provided by the camera vendor
to install the driver and the camera plugin. Make sure that you reference the location of the plugin in
the MV_HAL_PLUGIN_PATH
environment variable.
To get started with OpenEB, you can download some sample recordings and visualize them with metavision_viewer or you can stream data from your Prophesee-compatible event-based camera.
Running the test suite is a sure-fire way to ensure you did everything well with your compilation and installation process.
-
Download the files necessary to run the tests. Click
Download
on the top right folder. Beware of the size of the obtained archive which weighs around 1.2 Gb. -
Extract and put the content of this archive to
<OPENEB_SRC_DIR>/datasets
. For instance, the correct path of sequencegen31_timer.raw
should be<OPENEB_SRC_DIR>/datasets/openeb/gen31_timer.raw
. -
To run the test suite you need to reconfigure your build environment using CMake and to recompile
- Compilation using CMake
-
Regenerate the build using CMake (note that
-DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE
must be absolute path, not a relative one)::cd <OPENEB_SRC_DIR>/build cmake .. -A x64 -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=<OPENEB_SRC_DIR>\cmake\toolchains\vcpkg.cmake -DVCPKG_DIRECTORY=<VCPKG_SRC_DIR> -DBUILD_TESTING=ON
-
Compile:
cmake --build . --config Release --parallel 4
- Compilation using MS Visual Studio
-
Generate the Visual Studio files using CMake (adapt the command to your Visual Studio version and note that
-DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE
must be absolute path, not a relative one):cmake .. -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" -A x64 -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=<OPENEB_SRC_DIR>\cmake\toolchains\vcpkg.cmake -DVCPKG_DIRECTORY=<VCPKG_SRC_DIR> -DBUILD_TESTING=ON
-
Open the solution file
metavision.sln
, select theRelease
configuration and build theALL_BUILD
project.
-
Running the test suite is then simply
ctest -C Release