On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 8:37 AM, Gregory Guthrie
I wanted to look into using Haskell for an introductory Image Processing class, but the main package used for such things (OpenCV) does not appear to be available for windows systems.
Is there some other good option for image processing in Haskell, or has anyone ported openCV to a windows Leksah environment?
Which package are you having difficulty with? OpenCV is a library written in C/C++ and appears to work on Windows, and there looks to be two different packages on Hackage providing bindings to it, neither of which seems to have any issues with Windows. One does rely on the unix package, but my understanding is that Cygwin is sufficient for that--not certain about the details, though. I haven't used any of these packages or OpenCV itself personally, so there may be further issues I'm not seeing, but I would guess that any difficulty you've encountered was a matter of build tools and system configuration, not the libraries themselves. I have found it necessary on multiple occasions to do manual tweaks and jury-rigging when installing FFI bindings from Hackage on Windows, as opposed to the typically seamless process of installing an external library from standard repositories on Ubuntu and then bindings from Hackage. Admittedly this may be due in large part to the horrendous condition of build tools on my Windows system. I believe I have two different GHCs and no less than four copies of GCC in different locations and I've given up on making sense of it since I'm rarely on my Windows machine when coding Haskell anyway. Incidentally, have you looked at what functionality the bindings packages offer? Both that I saw on Hackage seem to advertise themselves as emphatically not production-ready code and probably don't expose all the features of OpenCV. Before you put a lot of time into fixing build problems, you may want to verify that they even provide what you need. As a last resort, writing your own Haskell FFI bindings to a C library is sometimes tedious but not usually difficult, and there are tools to help automate the task. I'm not aware of any other existing packages in Haskell for image processing or computer vision. Depending on what you need, you could write FFI bindings (to OpenCV or something else) or, if you mostly want to work with raw data instead of using algorithms provided by the library, there was actually a question on Stack Overflow recently that may be relevant: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6006304 - C.