Install visp with Homebrew, apt, Nix

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• visp-calibrate-camera
• visp-compute-apriltag-poses
• visp-compute-chessboard-poses
• visp-compute-eye-in-hand-calibration
• visp-compute-eye-to-hand-calibration
• visp-config
• visp-read-rs-dataset
• visp-save-rs-dataset

Project history

ViSP's research lineage predates its GitHub repository. The official documentation says the team has developed and released ViSP as an open-source library since 2005, and asks researchers to cite the 2005 IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine article by Eric Marchand, Fabien Spindler, and Francois Chaumette. That paper describes ViSP as a generic software platform with a wide class of robot-control skills.

The library was designed for hardware independence, simplicity, extensibility, and portability. Its original focus was visual servoing: controlling robot motion by regulating visual features observed by a camera. Over time, the documentation describes expansion into visual tracking, image processing, model-based tracking, pose estimation, simulation, Python bindings, and a DNN module for object detection and classification.

The public GitHub repository was created in September 2015 under the Lagadic organization. Releases in the 3.x series show continuing maintenance: 3.0.1 in 2017, 3.1.0 in 2017, 3.2.0 in 2019, 3.3.0 in 2020, 3.4.0 in 2021, 3.5.0 in 2022, 3.6.0 in 2023, and 3.7.0 in December 2025.

Adoption history

ViSP's adoption is primarily academic and robotics-focused. The official README and documentation emphasize publication citation, research-team stewardship, tutorial material, and examples for real and simulated robots. It is also integrated in ROS build contexts and tested across Linux, macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, and multiple architectures.

The project has become a reusable research platform rather than only a sample implementation from a paper. Its maintained examples, tutorials, hardware interfaces, and third-party integrations give robotics researchers a common base for validating visual servoing and tracking algorithms.

How it is used

Users typically consume ViSP as a C++ library, building with CMake and linking modules for core math, I/O, GUI, vision, robot control, detection, tracking, and simulation tasks. The documentation points to examples for image acquisition, display, camera-pose computation, homography estimation, and real or simulated visual-servoing schemes.

The command-line tools packaged with ViSP reflect common robotics workflows: camera calibration, AprilTag and chessboard pose computation, eye-in-hand and eye-to-hand calibration, and RealSense dataset reading or saving.

Why package nerds care

ViSP is significant as a package because it brings a research-grade robotics and computer-vision stack into ordinary system package managers. For users building robotics demos, ROS components, calibration workflows, or visual tracking experiments, installing a packaged ViSP can avoid hand-assembling a long-lived Inria research codebase from source.

Its long history also matters: a 2005 research platform that still ships 3.x releases two decades later is a useful dependency anchor in a field where many academic code releases are short-lived.

Timeline

• 2005: ViSP described in IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine and released as an open-source visual servoing library.
• 2015: Public GitHub repository created under lagadic/visp.
• 2017: 3.0.1 and 3.1.0 releases published in the GitHub release line.
• 2019: 3.2.0 release continued the modular 3.x series.
• 2021: 3.4.0 released.
• 2023: 3.6.0 released.
• 2025: 3.7.0 released and documented.

Related projects

• Official related projects include visp_contrib, visp_sample, visp_started, UsTK, camera_localization, and ROS integrations. The library also relies on and interoperates with third-party robotics and vision software such as OpenCV and CMake-based toolchains.

Sources

• https://api.github.com/repos/lagadic/visp
• https://api.github.com/repos/lagadic/visp/releases?per_page=8
• https://inria.hal.science/inria-00351899
• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lagadic/visp/master/README.md
• https://visp-doc.inria.fr/doxygen/visp-3.7.0/index.html