Building AliceVision from source on Ubuntu 18.04

A how-to for building AliceVision photogrammetry software on Ubuntu 18.04. These instructures were compiled on 3 June 2019. Future changes to AliceVision repositories may break these instructions. Feedback is welcome via the GitHub issue tracker.

Hardware pre-prerequisites: an Nvidia CUDA compatible video card is required. One of the numerical packages (Magma) has a non-optional dependency on this. If you don't have a suitable graphics card you are out of luck: there is no CPU fall back that I'm aware of.

These instructions were based on many hours of trial-and-error on a working Ubuntu 18.04 distribution kitted with a modest Nvidia graphics card (GeForce GT 730). I'd normally refine these instructions by testing on a clean installation running in a virtual machine, but because of the CUDA dependency this is not possible.

Pre build preperation

Let's keep it all together in under one directory. Let's call this 'alice_vision'. Define a environment variable:

export ALICEVISION_DIR=$HOME/alice_vision
mkdir $ALICEVISION

Now install required packages from the Ubuntu repository:

sudo apt install gfortran gcc-6
sudo apt install libboost-all-dev libilmbase-dev libopenexr-dev libopenimageio-dev 
sudo apt install libeigen3-dev libopenblas-dev libxinerama-dev libxcursor-dev 

Install CUDA

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
sudo apt update
sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall

Build and install Magma

cd $ALICEVISION_DIR
wget http://icl.utk.edu/projectsfiles/magma/downloads/magma-2.5.0.tar.gz
tar xvzf magma-2.5.0.tar.gz
cd magma-2.5.0
cp make.inc-examples/make.inc.openblas ./make.inc
export OPENBLASDIR=/usr
export CUDADIR=/usr
make -j4
sudo make install

This will install under /usr/local/magma

Build and install uncertaintyTE

cd $ALICEVISION_DIR
git clone https://github.com/alicevision/uncertaintyTE.git
cd uncertaintyTE
export MAGMA_ROOT=/usr/local/magma
mkdir build; cd build; cmake ..
make -j4
sudo make install

Build and install geogram

cd $ALICEVISON_DIR
git clone https://github.com/alicevision/geogram.git
cd geogram
sh -f configure.sh
cd build/Linux64-gcc-dynamic-Release 
make -j4
make install

Build and install OpenImageIO

cd $ALICEVISION_DIR
git clone https://github.com/OpenImageIO/oiio.git
cd oiio
mkdir build; cd build; cmake ..
make -j4
sudo make install

Build and install alembic

cd $ALICEVISION_DIR
git clone https://github.com/alicevision/alembic.git
cd alembic
mkdir build; cd build; cmake ..
make -j4
sudo make install

Build and install AliceVision

This requires older gcc version 6.

cd $ALICEVISION_DIR
git clone https://github.com/alicevision/AliceVision.git
cd AliceVision
mkdir build; cd build; 
CC=gcc-6 CXX=g++-6 cmake ../AliceVision
make -j4
sudo make install

This is install under /usr/local.

Download and run meshroom

cd $ALICEVISION_DIR
https://github.com/alicevision/meshroom.git
cd meshroom
pip install -r requirements.txt 

And run:

PYTHONPATH=$PWD python meshroom/ui

All going well you should see a UI similar to the screen shot above.

TODO:

meshroom seems to support a better 3D viewer, which involes building qmlAlembic. I still haven't figured how to get this working yet.