Installation From Source

All of the install guides I read were telling me to use macports or brew to install OpenCV. Neither method worked, so I had to resort to building from source, which turned out to be the easiest of the three methods:

$ tar xvf OpenCV-2.4.0.tar
$ cd OpenCV-2.4.0
$ cmake -G "Unix Makefiles"
$ make
$ sudo make install

Installation Using Homebrew

I may have spoke too soon - If you plan on using the python bindings “python -c ‘import cv2’” you may get a seg fault installing out of the box if you were using Python 2.6. To fix this issue, you need to install Python 2.7.* from the dmg download on Python.org. After it is installed you need to rebuild and re-install this project like above but after you run cmake, you need to modify the following variable PYTHON_LIBRARY:FILEPATH to

/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/libpython2.7.dylib

Than re-run make/sudo make install.

It is important to note that if you want to use the OpenCV’s Python bindings import cv or import cv2, and you are using virtual environment (recommended), you need to copy the cv.so/cv2.so shared libaries into your sites-packages directory: