Installation of SDK on Windows

This section describes how to install Metavision SDK on Windows 10 64-bit.

Metavision SDK comes as pre-built Windows installer of our whole software offer including the Prophesee Camera Plugins. It does not require compilation and installation of OpenEB. The quickest way to begin working with Prophesee technology is to install Metavision Studio only. Follow the guide on the Installation of Studio To install the open source project, OpenEB, follow the specific guide on the Installation of OpenEB.

Requirements

Please note the base system requirements for using Metavision:

  • Operating system: Windows 10 64-bit

  • Architecture: amd64 (a.k.a. x64)

  • Graphic card: must support OpenGL 3.0 minimum

  • CPU: must support AVX2

For the Linux installation, see the page SDK installation on Linux. For other operating systems and architectures, you must clone our open source project OpenEB and contact us if you run into compatibility issues.

Prerequisites

Upgrading Metavision

First of all, read carefully the Release Notes as some changes may impact your usage of our SDK (e.g. API updates) and cameras (e.g. firmware update might be necessary).

Then, if you have previously installed any Prophesee’s software, you will need to uninstall it first:

  1. Make sure that no Prophesee or Metavision software is running

  2. Open the Start menu

  3. Click Settings

  4. Search for Apps & features via the search

  5. In the list of installed programs, find any Prophesee or Metavision software and click the Uninstall button

  6. Check that there is no Prophesee folder left in your Program Files folder (if still present, delete it)

Warning

Removing the old version of Metavision SDK is mandatory even for patch upgrade (e.g. from 2.2.0 to 2.2.1)

Installing Dependencies

Install Python (version 3.7 or 3.8), if not yet available on your machine:

  • Download “Windows x86-64 executable installer” for one of these Python versions:

  • Run the installer and follow the prompt

  • We advise you to check the box to update the PATH or update the PATH manually with the following paths after replacing the Username to your own and using the Python version you installed (here, we assume that the install is limited to the local user and the default install path was used):

    C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python37
C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python37\Scripts

Then, install required Python libraries using pip. Open a command prompt and run the command:

python -m pip install pip --upgrade
python -m pip install "opencv-python>=4.5.5.64" "sk-video==1.1.10" "fire==0.4.0" "numpy<=1.21" pandas scipy h5py
python -m pip install jupyter jupyterlab matplotlib "ipywidgets==7.6.5"

Note

You can use anaconda to install Python and conda to manage your Python packages, but be sure to use a Python version that we support. You will need to adapt the library installation steps accordingly and use conda whenever we use pip. In this documentation, we chose to use pip as a package manager. We recommend using it with virtualenv to avoid conflicts with other installed Python packages.

Finally, install FFMPEG library which is required to write videos:

Installation

If not yet done, sign-up page Metavision SDK, then:

  • Follow the link to download the Metavision SDK Windows installer

  • Among the list of SDK installers (Metavision_SDK_xyz_Setup.exe), download the one with highest version number

  • You can safely ignore other files (e.g. Metavision_Studio_xyz_Setup.exe) as SDK installer contains everything you need

  • Run the SDK installer

Note

For a given minor release of Metavision Intelligence (e.g. 3.0), all the patch versions (e.g. 3.0.0 and 3.0.1) are available in the file repository link your sign-up gave you access to.

If you want to install an old minor version of Metavision Intelligence (e.g. 3.0 whereas current is 3.1), you need the file repository link corresponding to that version. If you don’t have it, you will have to go through the sign-up page of the given version (links for previous minor versions: 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 and 3.0). Then you should follow the installation guide of this version.

Get started!

You are now ready to use Metavision Intelligence. The best way to start getting familiar with the event-based technology is to open an event-based camera with Metavision Studio to begin data collection and visualization. You can choose to dive directly in the SDK by following a Tutorial or looking at a Code Sample.

If you want to use the Machine Learning modules (ML and Core ML), please follow the next section that describes the required additional dependencies.

Additional Dependencies for Machine Learning Module

To use Machine Learning features, you need to install some additional dependencies. If you have some Nvidia hardware with GPUs, install CUDA (10.2 or 11.1) and cuDNN to leverage them with PyTorch and LibTorch. Make sure that you install a version of CUDA that is compatible with your GPUs by checking Nvidia compatibility page.

Note

At the moment, we don’t support OpenCL and AMD GPUs.

Packages for Python

Metavision ML requires PyTorch 1.8.2 LTS. This version was deprecated by PyTorch team but can still be downloaded in the Previous Versions page of pytorch.org (in future releases of Metavision ML, more recent version of PyTorch will be leveraged). Retrieve and execute the pip command for the installation:

PyTorch install

Metavision ML has additional Python requirements that can be installed with pip:

python -m pip install numba llvmlite profilehooks "pytorch_lightning==1.5.10"
python -m pip install "pycocotools==2.0.4" "tqdm==4.63.0"
python -m pip install "torchmetrics==0.7.2" "seaborn==0.11.2" "kornia==0.6.1"

LibTorch for C++

To compile and run the neural network inference in a C++ pipeline, you need LibTorch (PyTorch’s C++ frontend)

Pre-trained Models

We also provide pre-trained models for inference in automotive applications. They can be downloaded during the sign-up.