Qt and computer vision 1 : Setup environment of Qt5 on windows step by step

    Long time haven't updated my blog, today rather than write a newer, advanced deep learning topics like "Modern way to estimate homography matrix(by lightweight cnn)" or "Let us create a semantic segmentation model by PyTorch", I prefer to start a series of topics for new comers who struggling to build a computer vision app by c++. I hope my posts could help more people find out  use c++ to develop application could as easy as another "much easier to use languages"(ex : python).

    Rather than introduce you most of the features of Qt and opencv like other books did, these topics will introduce the subsets of Qt which could help us develop decent computer vision application step by step.

c++ is as easy to use as python, really?

    Many programmers may found this nonsense, but my own experience told me it is not, because I never found languages like python, java or c# are "much easier to use compare with c++". What make our perspective become so different? I think the answers are

1. Know how to use c++ effectively.
2. There exist great libraries for the tasks(ex : Qt, boost, opencv, dlib, spdlog etc).

    As long as these two conditions are satisfy, I believe many programmers will have the same conclusion as mine. I will try my best to help you learn how to develop easy to maintain application by c++ in these series, show you how to solve those "small yet annoying issues" which may scare away many new comers.

Install visual c++ 2015

    Some of you may ask "why 2015 but not 2017"? Because when I am writing this post, cuda do not have decent support on visual c++ 2017 or mingw yet, cuda is very important to computer vision app, especially when deep learning take over many computer vision tasks today.

1. Go to this page, click on the download button of visual studio 2015.

2. Download visual studio 2015 community(you may need to open an account before you can enter this page)

3. Double click on the exe "en_visual_studio_community_2015_with_update_3_x86_x64_web_installer_xxxx" and wait a few minutes.

4. Install visual c++ tool box as following shown, make sure you select all of them.

    Install Qt5 on windows

1. Go to the download page of Qt
2. Select open source version of Qt

3. Click download button, wait until qt-unified-windows downloaded.

4. Double click on the installer, click next->skip->next

5. Select the path you want to install Qt

6. Select the version of Qt you want to install, every version of Qt(Qt5.x) have a lot of binary files to download, only select the one you need. We prefer to install Qt5.9.5 at here. Why Qt5.9.5? Because Qt5.9 is a long term support version of Qt, in theory long term support should be more stable.

7. Click next and install.

Test Qt5 installed or not

1. Open QtCreator and run an example. Go to your install path(ex: C:/Qt/3rdLibs/Qt), navigate to your_install_path/Tools/QtCreator/bin and double click on the qtcreator.exe.

2. Select Welcome->Example->Qt Quick Controls 2 - Gallery

3. Click on the example, it may pop out a message box to ask you some questions, you can click on yes or no.

4. Every example you open would pop out help page like this, keep it or not is your choices, sometimes they are helpful.

5. First, select the version of Qt you want to use(surrounded by red bounding box). Second, keep the shadow build option on(surrounded by green bounding box), why keep it on? Because shadow build could help you separate your source codes and build binary. Third select you want to build your binary as debug or release version(surrounded by blue bounding box). Usually we cannot mix debug/release libraries together, I will open another topic to discuss the benefits of debug/release, explain what is MT/MD, which one you should choose etc.

6. Click on the run button or Ctrl + R, then you should see the example running on your computer.