Bob is a free signal-processing and machine learning toolbox originally developed by the Biometrics group at Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland.

The toolbox is written in a mix of Python and C++ and is designed to be both efficient and reduce development time. It is composed of a reasonably large number of packages that implement tools for image, audio & video processing, machine learning and pattern recognition.

If just want to use Bob's functionalities on your experiments, you are not supposed to install this package on your machine, but rather create your own personalised work environment depending on your needs, by collecting individual sub-packages based on your requirements.

If you are developing Bob packages which are supposed to built along side our nightly build system, please read on.

There are 2 options you can follow to get this package installed and operational on your computer: you can use automatic installers like pip (or easy_install) or manually download, unpack and use zc.buildout to create a virtual work environment just for this package.

Using pip is the easiest (shell commands are marked with a $ signal):

$ pip install bob

You can also do the same with easy_install:

$ easy_install bob

This will download and install this package plus any other required dependencies. It will also verify if the version of Bob you have installed is compatible.

This scheme works well with virtual environments by virtualenv or if you have root access to your machine. Otherwise, we recommend you use the next option.

Download the latest version of this package from PyPI and unpack it in your working area. The installation of the toolkit itself uses buildout. You don't need to understand its inner workings to use this package. Here is a recipe to get you started:

$ python bootstrap-buildout.py
$ ./bin/buildout

These 2 commands should download and install all non-installed dependencies and get you a fully operational test and development environment.

You can generate the documentation for all packages in this container, after installation, using Sphinx:

$ ./bin/sphinx-build . sphinx

This shall place in the directory sphinx, the current version for the documentation of the package.

In the next subsections we have instructions for the maintainers of the package.

To add a package on bob, just append the package name in the file ('requirements.txt').

If you want to update the version of the dependency packages, run the following commands:

$ ./bin/get_versions.py > requirements.txt
$ git commit requirements.txt -m "Update requeriments" && git push

To remove a package on bob, just append the package name in the file ('requirements.txt').