How to install Greg Mori’s superpixel MATLAB code?

This short note aims to show you how to use superpixel code from Greg Mori whose codes are observed to have very good results and used by a bunch of computer vision researchers. However, the installation process can be challenging sometimes ^_^, so I figured it’d be nice if I document the process so that it will be easier for absolute beginners to use the code, and more importantly…I can come back to read when I forget how to do it.

I have MATLAB R2010a installed on my Ubuntu 32-bit 10.04 LTS – the Lucid Lynx

I download Mori’s code, extract the zipped file to a folder called superpixels. The folder is located at
/home/student1/MATLABcodes/superpixels

Next I download the boundary detector code from the link
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/CS/vision/grouping/segbench/code/segbench.tar.gz
I extract it to a folder called segbench, then I put it inside the superpixels
/home/student1/MATLABcodes/superpixels/segbench
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Here are the instructions of the folders

README (Mori’s)

– Run mex on *.c in yu_imncut directory
– Obtain mfm-pb boundary detector code from
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/projects/vision/grouping/segbench/
– Change path names in sp_demo.m and pbWrapper.m
– Get a fast processor and lots of RAM
– Run sp_demo.m

README (segbench’s)
(1) For the image and segmentation reading routines in the Dataset
directory to work, make sure you edit Dataset/bsdsRoot.m to point to
your local copy of the BSDS dataset.

(2) Run ‘gmake install’ from this directory to build everything.  You
should then probably put the lib/matlab directory in your MATLAB path.

(3) Read the Benchmark/README file.
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According to the README instruction
– Run mex on *.c in yu_imncut directory
I run mex on all the .c file in the folder
/home/student1/MATLABcodes/superpixels/yu_imncut
I don’t know why the command mex *.c does not work, so I have to run mex on every file one by one. Each time I run mex, I will get message
“Warning: You are using gcc version “4.4.3-4ubuntu5)”.  The version
currently supported with MEX is “4.2.3”.
For a list of currently supported compilers see:
http://www.mathworks.com/support/compilers/current_release/”
However, it seems to work fine since I can see all the .mexglx files show up in the folder. So I assume I do it correctly and go on the next step.

In this step,
– Obtain mfm-pb boundary detector code from
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/projects/vision/grouping/segbench/
I got the code already, so I follow the README (segbench’s). Firstly, I do
(1) For the image and segmentation reading routines in the Dataset
directory to work, make sure you edit Dataset/bsdsRoot.m to point to
your local copy of the BSDS dataset.
So, I go to the file /home/student1/MATLABcodes/superpixels/segbench/Dataset/bsdsRoot.m and change the root to
root = ‘/home/student1/MATLABcodes/superpixels’;
which contains the image I want to segment, “img_000070.jpg”

Next, I do (2) in README (segbench’s)
(2) Run ‘gmake install’ from this directory to build everything.  You
should then probably put the lib/matlab directory in your MATLAB path.
Now at the folder, student1@student1-desktop:~/MATLABcodes/superpixels/segbench$
we need to make MATLAB seen in this folder, so we export the MATLAB path
student1@student1-desktop:~/MATLABcodes/superpixels/segbench$ PATH=$PATH:/usr/share/matlabr2010a/bin
student1@student1-desktop:~/MATLABcodes/superpixels/segbench$ export PATH
then use make install, this time I got quite a long message in the terminal
student1@student1-desktop:~/MATLABcodes/superpixels/segbench$ make install
Then you will notice some files in the folder
/home/student1/MATLABcodes/superpixels/segbench/lib/matlab
What you have to do here is to addpath in MATLAB by typing in the command window
addpath(’/home/student1/MATLABcodes/superpixels/segbench/lib/matlab’);

Next, (3) Read the Benchmark/README file. I found that we don’t have to do anything in this step. So just skip this.

Now it’s the last step
Change path names in sp_demo.m and pbWrapper.m
so, go to the folder /home/student1/MATLABcodes/superpixels and change the path
in pbWrapper.m I make the path pointing to ‘/home/student1/MATLABcodes/superpixels/segbench/lib/matlab’
in sp_demo.m I make the path pointing to
‘/home/student1/MATLABcodes/superpixels/yu_imncut’

Now run the file sp_demo.m. Unfortunately you will get some error messages because of a function spmd. This happens because MATLAB 2010a has function spmd of its own which has the number of input argument different from that of spmd from the toolbox. One way to get around this is to change the name of spmd.c in the toolbox to spmd2.c, then compile spmd2.c using mex spmd2.c. Then replace spmd(…) with spmd2(…). If you encounter more errors from this point on, don’t panic, because it’s probably from this spmd issue, so just do the same thing and it will work fine.

That’s it! Enjoy Greg Mori’s code!

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For windows users, please refer to Thanapong’s blog, whose URL is given below:
http://blog.thanapong.in.th/arah/?p=29