These instructions explain how to use VLFeat from the command line (shell).
Download and unpack the latest
VLFeat binary distribution in a directory of your choice
(e.g. ~/src/vlfeat). Let VLFEATROOT denote
this directory.
The command line tools are located
in VLFEATROOT/bin/ARCH. Here ARCH denotes
the subdirectory relative to your architecture (e.g. mac
for Mac OS X PPC, maci for Mac OS X
Intel, glnx86 for Linux, and so on). For the sake of
illustration, the following table gives the path to the SIFT feature
extraction program for the varius architectures:
| Platform | ARCH |
Path to command |
|---|---|---|
| Windows 32 | win32 |
VLFEATROOT\bin\w32\sift.exe |
| Windows 64 | win64 |
VLFEATROOT\bin\w64\sift.exe |
| Mac Intel 32 | maci |
VLFEATROOT/bin/maci/sift |
| Mac Intel 64 | maci64 |
VLFEATROOT/bin/maci64/sift |
| Mac PPC | mac |
VLFEATROOT/bin/mac/sift |
| Linux 32 | glnx86 |
VLFEATROOT/bin/glnx86/sift |
| Linux 64 | glnxa64 |
VLFEATROOT/bin/glnxa64/sift |
All commands have a corresponding man page found
in VLFEATROOT/src. For UNIX based systems, the man pages
can be viewed with the man utility. For instance
> man VLFEATROOT/src/sift.1
It might be convenient to add VLFeat to the system search paths. In
Linux and Mac OS X this involves modifying the PATH
and MANPATH environment variables. The exact details may
vary, but it should be enough to add the following to your
~/.bash_profile:
export PATH=VLFEATROOT/bin/ARCH:$PATH
export MANPATH=VLFEATROOT/src:$MANPATH
Alternatively, you can copy the executables and man pages to appropriate system-wide directories.