The latest version of VLFeat is 0.9.2, released on August 25, 2008.

Old versions may be obtained here

Installation

Installing VLFeat is very simple. After downloading and unpacking the most recent binary package (see above), follow these instructions:

To use the MATLAB Toolbox, simply run the vlfeat_setup command found in the vlfeat/toolbox directory. This command adds the necessary paths to MATLAB search path list. Notice that the paths are not saved. To automate this step, you can add the following fragment of code to your MATLAB startup.m file (on UNIX based system this file is located in ~/matlab/, where ~ denotes your home directory):

p=pwd ;
cd PATHTOVLFEAT ;
cd toolbox ;
vlfeat_setup
cd(p) ;
clear p

To install the command line utilities, copy the appropriate files from the vlfeat/bin directory to a location in your command path.

Finally, to use the C library in your programs, include the appropriate files from the vlfeat/vl hierarchy and link against libvl.a located in the appropriate subdirectory in the vlfeat/bin hierarchy.

Compiling VLFeat

Note: Compiling is not necessary if you make use of the binary distribution.

For UNIX based platforms (Mac OS X and Linux), the library bundles a GNU-Make makefile (Makefile). The makefile tries to auto-detect the environment and automatically configure itself. In most cases, typing make is all it is required to compile everything. If this does not work, please edit the makefile and make the necessary adjustment to the flags.

For Windows, the library bundles a NMake makefile (Makefile.mak). In order to use it, you must open Makefile.mak and adjust the values of configuration variables to match your setup. Once you have done that, start the Visual Studio Command Prompt and type nmake /f Makefile.mak.

Windows: Troubleshooting common problems:

syntax error: '=' unexpected:

Use nmake /f Makefile.mak. Without /f, nmake will default to the wrong makefile.

'long' followed by 'long' is illegal:

This error is usually caused by attempting to compile outside of the Visual Studio Command Prompt.

Contributing to VLFeat

We welcome contributions to both the documentation and the source code of VLFeat. To contribute to either the library or the documentation, you can create patches against our Git repository and send them to us for inclusion in the next version. The first step is to clone our public repository using:

git clone http://vision.ucla.edu/vlfeat/vlfeat.git

Once you have made and committed your changes locally, consider submitting them to the project via e-mail using a command like git-format-patch:

git-format-patch origin