How to Safely Install OpenCV on the Mac M1
Blog post from Roboflow
OpenCV is a widely used computer vision library that poses installation challenges on Macs with M1 processors due to architecture incompatibility with the prevalent amd64 architecture used by most computers. The M1's arm64 architecture requires specific versions of OpenCV and its dependencies that are not always available through standard package managers like pip, which may default to amd64 versions. To address this, the use of virtual environments in Miniforge, a more suitable alternative to Anaconda, is recommended for managing the installation of arm64-compatible packages. This involves using Homebrew to install Miniforge, setting up a virtual environment with a compatible Python version, and installing OpenCV from the conda-forge channel, which offers a larger library of arm64-compatible packages. This approach ensures smoother operation and avoids common errors related to incompatible dependencies, while pip's method of installation remains unreliable due to its tendency to install amd64 versions that require Rosetta for compatibility, leading to potential issues.