How To Install OpenCV on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OpenCV on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, OpenCV is a programming library that focuses on real-time computer vision with the support of GPU and multi-core processing. OpenCV is used for a wide range of applications, including medical image analysis, stitching street view images, surveillance video, detecting and recognizing faces, extracting 3D models, and much more. OpenCV is a cross-platform library so that it can run well on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the OpenCV on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 22.04, 20.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo useror access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install OpenCV on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install wget apt-transport-https gnupg2 software-properties-common

Step 2. Installing OpenCV on Ubuntu 22.04.

• Install OpenCV using Python.

By default, OpenCV is available on Ubuntu 22.04 base repository. Now run the following command below to install the latest stable version of OpenCV to your Ubuntu system:

sudo apt install python3-opencv libopencv-dev

In addition, you can install OpenCV using Pip Python:

sudo apt install python3-pip
pip install opencv-python

To confirm the installation of OpenCV by the above-executed command, we will display its version:

python3 -c "import cv2"

• Install OpenCV Ubuntu from the source code.

First, we install the build tools and dependencies:

sudo apt-get install cmake gcc g++ python3-dev python3-numpy libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev libgstreamer1.0-dev libgtk2.0-dev libgtk-3-dev

After installing the build tools, you now need to download the OpenCV source:

git clone https://github.com/opencv/opencv.git

Now, navigate to the opencv folder you downloaded earlier. Make a new folder called build and go to it. From the build directory, we can now use ubuntu OpenCV install with these commands:

sudo cmake ../
sudo make

Congratulations! You have successfully installed OpenCV. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing OpenCV on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official OpenCV website.