Re: image acquisition (under Windows)

[John Swensen]

On Oct 13, 2010, at 9:36 AM, Bart Vandewoestyne wrote:

> Hello list,
> 
> Together with a collegue of mine, I am investigating the
> possibilities of Octave for a student project that has to do with
> image acquisition and processing.  Basically, the students will
> have to use a webcam to take snapshots from a flower in order to
> make time lapse videos and do some image processing on the
> snapshots of the flower.  Most of our students (if not all) will
> do this under Windows.
> 
> My collegue has some examples implemented in 'the other leading
> brand' that use the Image Acquisition Toolbox's functions
> 
>  videoinput
>  preview
>  getsnapshot
> 
> to get the snapshots.
> 
> Due to license-issues and because we prefer to use Open Source
> software, we would like the students to do this project under
> Octave.  However, we are wondering if there is a good Octave
> alternative for the commands from the Image Acquisition Toolbox
> that will work on Octave under Windows (and preferably, but not
> necessarily, also under Linux).
> 
> After some googling and searching the help archives, the
> following not-so-very-optimistic post from 2005 is the only thing
> I could find:
> 
> http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/image-data-acquisition-toolbox-td1601729.html
> 
> Does this mean that we are stuck and we can't do our image
> acquisition under Windows it with Octave?  Or has the situation
> improved since 2005?
> 
> Kind regards,
> Bart
> 
> 

I think one of the problems with USB based cameras is that they don't always 
have the same interface. However, there are libraries with Octave compatible 
licenses out there that deal with this and provide a consistent interface to a 
large number of devices. If you can get the Octave 'java' package from 
OctaveForge working for Window then you can probably use the FMJ and/or 
LTI-CIVIL libraries to perform image capture.

On the other hand, Firewire (IEEE1394) cameras do have a defined interface with 
which I think most vendors comply.  Let me look around, but I am pretty sure I 
have code for an Octave extension (compiles to an .oct file) that uses the 
libdc1394 library to acquire images.

John Swensen