General steps of linking openCV

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OpenCV is cross platform so you first should state which platform it is that you wish to compile and develop your code. I assume you are aiming at developing code for Windows OS. For all OSs here is the link.

For Windows you have 3 basic options:

One option is to download cygwin which is nice IF you are familiar with Unix environment. Then you compile the code as if you are working in Unix. If you are not familiar with Unix, you might face a steep learning curve.

The other option is to link OpenCV precompiled binaries to your code using Visual Studio. You can find the pre-compiled binaries here. Documentation for linking to pre-compiled binaries can be found here. This is the easiest option for beginners.

You can also download the source code from github and compile it yourself. Here is simple tutorial on how to do this

Hi, you can also try "Ceemple", it's a C++ based technical computing environment, and it already includes OpenCV so it's pretty straight forward to start working with the library. The bonuses are that you also get a JIT compiler and other open source C++ scientific computing libraries, that are already integrated in the IDE. It's free for download through: www.ceemple.com