Installation

On this page you find install instructions for Alida in C++ and in Java.

Java

Running Alida's operator runners and Grappa from command line

Extract the download Alida_bin.zip and change the current working directory to the top level directory of the extracted files.

You can start grappa using

tcsh ./runAlida.tcsh 

or

bash ./runAlida.bash

If you grant execute permissions to these scripts you can start them directly, e.g.

./runAlida.tcsh

If you in addition modify the variable ALIDA_HOME in these scripts you can start them from any any directory.

To start the graphical user interface to configure and start operators you may use

./runAlida.tcsh guioprunner

The command line interface is invoked, e.g., via

./runAlida.tcsh oprunner -h

which displays the help message.

Using Alida as a library in your own code

For using Alida as a library in your own code the most easy way to fulfill all requirements and dependencies is to use Maven.
Since Alida version 2.4 we offer a template Maven project which you can use as a starting point for your work:

• Maven-Template Project: zip
  

Just unzip the archive to a directory of your choice and follow the instructions in the README file included.
The project already defines all repositories and dependencies required to use Alida's functionality.

C++

The C++ implementation of Alida currently works only on Linux machines. For installing Alida perform the following steps:

1. Download the tar or zip archive from the Downloads section of this website.
2. Extract the archive to a directory of your choice which we denote by ALIDA_HOME in the following.
3. Download Loki, i.e. go to the SourceForge project page and download release 0.1.7 of the Loki library.
4. Extract the Loki archive to the folder ALIDA_HOME/external.
   Alternatively you can extract it somewhere else and set a link to that directory in ALIDA_HOME/external.
5. Define an environment variable 'ALIDA_CPP' with the path of your Alida installation, i.e. the path of ALIDA_HOME.
6. Enter the directory ALIDA_HOME/src and type 'make'.
7. The demo operator and the command line operator runner will be built.
   To run the demo operator, enter the directory ALIDA_HOME/src/runner/o.<your-machine> and execute it with

./ALDOpRunner DemoOperator intval=4711 doubleval=0.999999 floatval=0.123 stringval="Alida-Cpp"

Optional: include OpenCV demo operator and provider

To activate the OpenCV demo you need to have the OpenCV available on your system. Install instructions can be found here.
To build the OpenCV related classes of Alida edit the configuration file ALIDA_HOME/src/config.mk.
On top of the file you find a configuration section which defines three variables:

#############################################################################
# user-specific configuration
#############################################################################

OPENCV_SUPPORT = no
OPENCV_INCLUDE = /usr/include
OPENCV_LIB = /usr/lib

Change the value of OPENCV_SUPPORT to 'yes' and set include and library path variables according to your OpenCV installation.
Afterwards rebuild Alida by running 'make clean all'. The OpenCV demo operator can be run with

./ALDOpRunner DemoOperatorOpenCV inputImg=<example_image> sigma=151