How to setup Octave GNU 4.0+ for Raspbian

Question

I'm working on the project where I need to read engraved text on the frame. I'm taking a picture using the Raspberry Pi USB camera. I initially developed a script in MatLab which achieved over 70% accuracy for OCR. However as I'm using the student version of MatLab I could not compile the code as MatLab Coder and MatLab Compiler is not available and Simulink is limited. Therefore I looked at alternatives, of which the best I found is Octave GNU, but to work with some functions from MatLab it needs image library which is only available for Octave 4.0+.

Can someone guide me how to install Octave 4.0+ on Raspberry Pi (Raspbian)? Or if it is impossible is there any other program which would work as a clone of MatLab on RPi3?

The current version is 3.8.2 for Raspbian Jessie.

Answer 1

Octave 4.0.3 is now available in Stretch (Raspbian 9) and Jessie Backports.

Either:

• Install a clean image of Stretch and then install Octave 4.0.3 with sudo apt-get install octave

• Add the backports repository to your APT sources, and then install with sudo apt-get -t jessie-backports install octave.

As Octave has quite a few dependencies, I suspect that it's probably easier to use Stretch if possible. While compiling and installing it yourself is an option, it's going to be very slow and difficult compared to using Stretch or Jessie Backports.

Answer 2

1. Download the Octave 4.x. tar.gz source file.
2. Install all the required dependencies for Octave 4.x.
3. Configure, make, and make install.