installing the latest OpenCV with Python bindings on Linux Mint 18.1

Followed the Ubuntu 16.04 tutorial by Adrian Rosebrock with some changes. Since my installation had python using anaconda, I used conda install instead of pip install. And since my first attempt at creating a virtual environment failed, I went ahead with the installation without a virtual environment. Most of the requirements were already installed. My cmake string also had a different path to the python executable due to anaconda.

sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake pkg-config
sudo apt-get install libjpeg8-dev libtiff5-dev libjasper-dev libpng12-dev
sudo apt-get install libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev libv4l-dev
sudo apt-get install libxvidcore-dev libx264-dev 
sudo apt-get install libgtk-3-dev
sudo apt-get install libatlas-base-dev gfortran
sudo apt-get install python2.7-dev python3.5-dev

OpenCV stable version is now 3.3.1, so

wget -O opencv.zip https://github.com/Itseez/opencv/archive/3.3.1.zip

unzip opencv.zip

wget -O opencv_contrib.zip https://github.com/Itseez/opencv_contrib/archive/3.3.1.zip

unzip opencv_contrib.zip

conda install numpy

cd opencv-3.1.0/

mkdir build

cd build

cmake -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RELEASE \

    -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local \

    -D INSTALL_PYTHON_EXAMPLES=ON \

    -D INSTALL_C_EXAMPLES=ON \

    -D OPENCV_EXTRA_MODULES_PATH=~/opencv_contrib-3.3.1/modules \

    -D PYTHON_EXECUTABLE=/home/mac/anaconda2/bin/python \

    -D BUILD_EXAMPLES=ON ..

cmake rapidly went through its checks, then I had to do the build,

make

which took around half an hour judging by the timestamps - I was doing other things.... and then finally 

sudo make install

sudo ldconfig

Verified by doing

ls -l /usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/

which showed up cv2.so

and finally linked this cv2.so to the site-packages folder, in my case

cd ~/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/site-packages

ln -s /usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cv2.so cv2.so

Tested by opening a python shell, importing cv2 and checking its version,

python

 >>> import cv2
>>> cv2.__version__
'3.3.1'
>>>

Edit: August 2019 - updated instructions for installing on Ubuntu 18.04 - 
https://www.pyimagesearch.com/2018/05/28/ubuntu-18-04-how-to-install-opencv/