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Installation of libpointmatcher on Windows using MSVC

This tutorial will guide you through the different steps to install libpointmatcher and its dependencies.

This tutorial is divided up like this:

Introduction

Resources

Name Download Link Version
(Tested February 11, 2021)
Windows 10 v1909 64bit
Visual Studio https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/ 2019 16.8.5
MSVC++ Compiler (with Visual Studio) 14.2
Git https://git-scm.com/downloads/ 2.30.1
CMake https://cmake.org/ 3.19.0
Boost https://www.boost.org/users/download/ 1.75.0
Eigen3 http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php 3.3.9
grep http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/grep.htm 2.5.4
libnabo https://github.com/ethz-asl/libnabo Commit 16250bf
libpointmatcher https://github.com/ethz-asl/libpointmatcher Commit e9a832d

Notes

  • It's recommended to use Windows PowerShell with administrator privileges as your CLI
  • All necessary environment variables will be configured so that CMake automatically finds all libraries and you don't have to specify the libraries' paths to CMake each time you use it
  • When adding any environment variable, add for All users (system variables)
  • Environment variables are case-insensitive (PATH = Path)
  • Add new environment variables in PATH on top of the list (to avoid conflicts)
  • You must restart your CLI and CMake for new environment variables to take effect
  • In this tutorial, C:\dev will be used as root directory for all installations. The folder can be wherever you want, but it is strongly recommended that the path has no spaces.

Installation

Prerequisites

  • C++ compiler (get MSVC compiler by installing Visual Studio)
  • Git
  • CMake

Install Boost

  1. Download boost_<version>.zip
  2. Extract boost_<version> in C:\dev

  3. Go to your Boost source directory with your CLI, and do:

    bash .\bootstrap.bat .\b2.exe

  4. Set the following three environment variables:
    BOOST_LIBRARYDIR = C:\dev\boost_<version>\stage\lib
    BOOST_INCLUDEDIR = C:\dev\boost_<version>
    BOOST_DIR = C:\dev\boost_<version>\stage\lib\cmake\Boost-<version>

  5. Add C:\dev\boost_<version>\stage\lib to Path environment variable

Install Eigen3

Eigen is header only (see Eigen's "Getting stated" page) and don't need to be build.

  1. Download eigen-<version>.zip
  2. Extract eigen-<version> in C:\dev
  3. Set EIGEN3_INC_DIR environment variable to C:\dev\eigen-<version> (folder with signature_of_eigen3_matrix_library file)

Install Grep

  1. Download the last Setup "Complete package" of Grep for Windows
  2. Execute the Setup and extract the GnuWin32 folder in C:\dev
  3. Add the path to the Grep .exe (C:\dev\GnuWin32\bin) files to the Path environment variable.

Install libnabo

You need to install Eigen3 and Grep before installing libnabo !

  1. Go to your desired directory with your CLI (here C:\dir)

  2. Do the following commands

    bash git clone https://github.com/ethz-asl/libnabo mkdir .\libnabo\build cd .\libnabo\build\ cmake-gui ..

    CMake-Gui will open up 1. Click on the button Configure and specify the generator for the project (Visual Studio 16 2019)

    An error will be reported, because CMake does not know yet where to find the libraries. The next steps will tell it where to find them. 1. Set the CMake variable EIGEN_INCLUDE_DIR to C:\dev\eigen-<version> 1. Click on the button Configure, Generate and then Open Project Visual Studio will open up Maybe you will have messages about Doxygen, OpenCL, ANN, FLANN and Python missing. They are not necessary to install libnano. 1. Put your "Solution Configuration" in Release mode 1. Build the ALL_BUILD project 1. Rebuild for each configuration mode you will use, i.e. Release/Debug/RelWithDebInfo/MinSizeRel
    (Libnabo build a different .lib for each configuration mode)

Install libpointmatcher

You need to install libnabo before installing libpointmatcher !

  1. Go to your desired directory with your CLI (here C:\dir)

  2. Do the following commands

    bash git clone https://github.com/ethz-asl/libpointmatcher mkdir .\libpointmatcher\build mkdir .\libpointmatcher\build\install cd .\libpointmatcher\build\ cmake-gui ..

    CMake-Gui will open up 1. Click on the button Configure and specify the generator for the project (Visual Studio 16 2019) 1. Set the CMake variable EIGEN_INCLUDE_DIR to C:\dev\eigen-<version> 1. Set the CMake variable CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX to C:/dev/libpointmatcher/build/install

    CAUTION ! Use forward slash / 1. Click on the button Configure, Generate and then Open Project
    Visual Studio will open up 1. Put your "Solution Configuration" in Release mode 1. Build the INSTALL project We have to install the library and not only build it, because otherwise all CMake files won't be able to be found by programs using libpointmatcher 1. Set libpointmatcher_DIR environment variable to C:\dev\libpointmatcher\build\install\share\libpointmatcher\cmake

Reporting Issues

Currently, we don't have a developer fully supporting compilation on Windows. If you can help refreshing this documentation, your help is more than welcome.

Before reporting new building issues, have a look in the current/past list of issues. Add as many details as you can since you will most probably receive answers from developers that cannot reproduce the problem on their side. Here are some of them:

  • Your directory structure need to be well organized as mentioned in Issue #136.
  • There might be some problems related to libnabo as mentioned in Issue #118.

Special Thanks

Special thanks to the following users in helping us with the Windows support:

  • kwill for keeping the documentation up-to-date and investing the time to get libpointmatcher compiling on Windows.
  • braddodson for porting a version of libpointmatcher to C# with a limited set of features. The code can be found here: https://github.com/braddodson/pointmatcher.net