Building tracker examples on Windows using Visual Studio

Visual Studio is a popular Windows-only IDE for C++/C# and other languages. Follow the steps below to compile the example trackers in Visual Studio. The steps were created using Visual Studio 2010 Express edition. Other versions may require different steps.

  1. To build tracker tracker examples in Microsoft Visual Studio, create an empty C/C++ project (if you are on a 64-bit machine, you have to create a 64-bit project).
  2. Import one of the three trackers that you find in vot-toolkit/tracker/examples/native directory into the project (in case of the NCC tracker you will also have to link against OpenCV library, but this is out of our scope).
  3. Import the vot.h header as a header file. This file contains all the necessary code required for the communication with the toolkit.
  4. What you have to do to enable trax is to compile with TRAX variable defined, provide path to trax.h header, and link against libtrax.dll. When running the tracker you have to make sure that libtrax.dll is visible by adding the directory to system PATH or by copying the library to the direcory that contains the executable of a tracker. To enable TraX support in Visual Studio you have to do the following steps:
    • Initialize workspace so that precompiled binaries are downloaded to vot-toolkit/native directory.
    • Go to Project properties > Configuration properties > C/C++ > General and add vot-toolkit/native path to Additional Include Directories.
    • Go to Project properties > Configuration properties > C/C++ > Preprocessor and add TRAX symbol to Preprocessor Definitions.
    • Go to Project properties > Configuration properties > Linker > General and add vot-toolkit/native path to Additional Library Directories.
    • Go to Project properties > Configuration properties > Linker > Input and add libtrax.dll.a path to Additional Dependencies.