ALTA: A BRDF Analysis Library

Linux , Windows

This is the repository for the ALTA library. ALTA is a set of cross-platform command line executables and shared object plugins allowing to analyze, fit and understand BRDF data and models.

ALTA targets: people working on BRDFs and willing to benchmark new BRDF models and compare them with state-of-the-art BRDF models and data easily; people working on optical measurements and wanting to experiment different fitting procedures and models; or people wanting to perform statistical analysis on your BRDF data.

Repository Organization

• data/: contains the data for which the fitting techniques are tested against. Files are separated by dimension of the input domain (e.g. 1d, 2d, 3d, ...).
• configs/: contains platform dependent configuration files for SCons.
• documents/: contains the documentation in doxygen format.
• external/: contains any third party library that needs to be used by ALTA. Contains a modified QuadProg++ library using Eigen. You can download and compile automatically some third party libraries using provided python scripts obtain_[libname].py. +sources/: contains all the source files.

Building

ALTA uses SCons, a Python-based build system.

To build ALTA, run a command like the following from the top-level source directory (noted ${ALTA} in the remainder of this document):

$ scons

If you want to use a specific configuration (i.e. change the default compiler, specify where some libraries should be found) you can use a configuration file using the --cfg [file] option:

$ scons --cfg=[config-file.py]

Here, config-file.py must be replaced with a suitable configuration file for your platform. For instance, when building with GCC on GNU/Linux, you may run:

$ scons --cfg=configs/scons/config-linux-gcc.py

ALTA provide a Python interface for non command-line experts. However, this interface is not built automatically. To build the Python interface, please run the following command at the root of the repository:

$ scons python

You can as well use a platform specific configuration file using the --cfg option.

Dependencies:

If not found on your system, our SCons script automatically download a recent version of the Eigen library.

• ALTA core: Eigen
• Plugin rational_fitter_eigen: Eigen 3.x
• Plugin rational_fitter_quadprog: Quadprog++
• Plugin rational_fitter_cgal: The CGAL library
• Plugin rational_fitter_parallel: The OpenMP library, Quadprog++ library and Eigen
• Plugin rational_fitter_matlab: Matlab engine (matlab.prf required)
• Plugin rational_fitter_parsec_*: PLASMA coreblas, PaRSEC runtime
• Plugin nonlinear_fitter_eigen: Eigen
• Plugin nonlinear_fitter_ceres: CERES library and its dependencies
• Plugin nonlinear_fitter_nlopt: NLOpt library and its dependencies
• Plugin nonlinear_fitter_ipopt: IpOpt library and its dependencies

Use ALTA

Once ALTA is compiled with its plugins, you can access the executables and library in ${ALTA}/sources/build. To access them directly from the shell, you can source the setpath.sh script at the root:

$ source setpath.sh

This will expose the binary and plugins to the systeme and allow you to run ALTA commands from anywhere.

For further use of ALTA, please refer to the documentation and tutorials.

Generate the documentation using Doxygen

If you have doxygen installed on your system, you can build the documentation (a static website) using the scons script:

$ scons doc

The static website is then available at:

${ALTA}/documents/doxygen/html/index.html