Menpo is a statistical facial modelling toolkit, providing all the tools required to build, fit, visualize, and test statistical models like Active Appearance Models and Morphable Models.

Menpo is currently under agressive development and is very much a work in progress. Documentation and examples are outdated, docstrings may be incorrect, tests are missing, and even core ideas are not yet fully formed. The project is at a pre-alpha stage, and this should be kept in mind at all times.

See setup.py for a full list. All of these bar those noted in the installation section below will be installed for you by pip install. Note however that these packages will have many of their own non-python dependencies (such as BLAS, or a Fortran compiler) and you will be expected to have these installed. If you are using Ubuntu, the quickest way of ensuring you have these base dependencies is to use the build-dep feature of apt-get, which grabs all build dependencies for a given Debian package.

For example, running

sudo apt-get build-dep python-numpy

will install all libraries that numpy requires to build. The libraries will definitely be sufficient to build the version of numpy that ships with your version of Ubuntu - and hopefully will be sufficient for the (newer) version of numpy pip will download for you when installing Menpo.

This table lists all libraries that are direct dependendencies of Menpo itself.

This table lists all system dependencies that python tools that Menpo relies upon (like Numpy) require.

In addition to the above dependencies, menpo requires numpy and cython be installed via pip prior to installation.

pip install numpy cython

After that, just run

pip install -e git+https://github.com/YOURGITHUBACCOUNT/menpo.git#egg=menpo

to install. We highly recommend you do this inside a virtualenv. Take a look at virtualenvwrapper to make your life easier. Note that we recommend that you grab a copy of the code from a personal fork of the project onto YOURGITHUBACCOUNT - this will make issuing changes back to the main repository much easier.

This explains a full installation process on a fresh version of Ubuntu 13.04. If this doesn't work for you, file a issue so the README can be updated!

First we get our core dependencies

sudo apt-get install git libassimp-dev python-vtk python-qt4 libglew-dev

Note you will need to set up git, but this is out of the scope of this README. Do that now and come back here.

Then we get the build requirements for the python packages that menpo will install for us

sudo apt-get build-dep python-numpy python-scipy python-matplotlib cython

We will use virtualenv to keep everything nice and neat:

sudo apt-get install virtualenvwrapper

Now close this terminal down and open a new one. You should see the initial setup of virtualenvwrapper happen.

We make a new virtualenv for menpo

mkvirtualenv menpo

and install numpy and cython

pip install numpy cython

finally, we want to enable global python packages so that this env can see the vtk python bindings we installed earlier

toggleglobalsitepackages

(it should notify you that this ENABLED the global site packages).

Now we are good to install menpo. It should take care of the rest

pip install -e git+https://github.com/YOURGITHUBACCOUNT/menpo.git#egg=menpo

The code is installed in the virtualenv we made. First, cd to it

cdvirtualenv

Then go to the source folder

cd src/menpo

Here you will find all the git repository for the project.

The above installation properly installs menpo just like any other package. Afterwards you just need to enable the menpo virutalenv

workon menpo

and then you can open up an IPython session and import menpo just as you would expect to be able to import numpy. Note that you can start a python session from anywhere - so long as the menpo env is activated, you will be able to use menpo.

As we installed menpo with the -e flag, the install is editable - which means that any changes you make to the source folder will actually change how menpo works. Let's say I wanted to print a silly message every time I import menpo. I could go the source folder:

cdvirtualenv && cd src/menpo

edit the menpo/__init__.py to print something

echo 'print "Hello world from menpo!"' >> menpo/__init__.py

then, after starting (or restarting) a python session, you should see the effect of the print statement immediately on import (try it out!) This means the general approach is to, iteratively,

1. Edit/add files in src/menpo either using a text editor/IDE like PyCharm
2. Restart an IPython session/open the PyCharm IPython to load the changes
3. Try out your changes

the only extra complication is when developing Cython modules (those that bridge C/C++ and Python). If you are doing development with Cython, or do a git fetch which includes a change to a Cython file, you will need to trigger the recompilation of the C/C++ code. To make this easy, there is a Makefile in src/menpo - just go there and

make

to check everything is up to date. As a first port of call, if something doesn't work as expected, I would run make here. Maybe you switched to a different git branch or something with different Cython files - if so, this would fix any problems.

For simplicity, we are using nosetests to test. Tests are simply python files with a name containing test. For now, tests are placed next to the modules that they test, inside a folder named test - see menpo.shape for an example. Tests themselves are functions with names starting with test_ inside one of these test files.

Running

nosetests -v

from the top of the repository is all this is required - nose will find all our tests and run them for us, ensuring that none of them throw exceptions. Note that a @raises decorator can also be used to test that desireable exceptions are raised.

Note that tests need to access the data folder in the repo frequently. For now, we have the assumption that nosetests is executed from the very top of the repo, so data can be reliably found at ./data/ in all tests.

Finally, note that nose runs through all of the menpo package looking for tests, importing everything as it goes (much like how Sphinx works looking for docs).

We use autogenerated documentation, provided by Sphinx and the numpy-docs extension. Inside the top-level folder docs you will find the ReStructed Text files (.rst) that create the documentation.

In order to build the documentation, run

make html 

inside the docs directory. This will then output a set of HTML documentation pages within the _build/html directory.

To add new documentation, add a new .rst file with the docs/menpo folder. The automodule Sphinx function is used in order to turn multiline function comments into formatted documentation.