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Computer Vision Applications and Linux?

Posted by Cliff on from the I-spy-with-my-digital-eye dept.

blackcoot asks: "I'm about to start work on a summer project with my advisor, part of which involves getting a lab set up for real time (or as close as we can get) computer vision applications. Currently, the only machines in the lab with digital video cameras attached to them are Win2k boxen, and that's only because we haven't been able to find reasonable drivers for the firewire cameras that we have. My advisor and I would much rather *not* write our own driver for these cameras; right now my advisor has the budget for a couple reasonably inexpensive cameras. This leads me to a couple questions: are there firewire (or equivalently high bandwidth bus) based digital video cameras (not framegrabbbers) out there that have reasonably solid Linux or Video4Linux drivers; have any Slashdot readers tried to build a vision type application under Linux (something that does more processing than Xaw TV); Am I setting myself up for a whole world of pain trying to make this happen under Linux, or is it doable? Any words of wisdom? Your help is much appreciated."

2 of 16 comments (clear)

  1. Depends on what kind of camera by Omega+Hacker · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you're referring to webcam or scientific-style cameras on the Firewire bus, they are supported by programs like Coriander through the libdc1394 interface and corresponding kernel drivers.

    If you're talking about consumer-grade video camcords (aka MiniDV), you'll use the dv1394 interface and corresponding kernel modules, plus libdv [one of my projects] to decode the images (on a fast enough machine, about 700MHz PIII pegged still).

    I haven't heard of any other types of firewire cameras, so if you have something that doesn't fit into one of these two categories, you got shafted IMO.

    Depending on your processing requirements as far as data-flow, you may want to look at GStreamer, another of my projects, to plug together the DV device interface, DV decoder if necessary, and your processing components.

    All of these are found on sourceforge under the names given, putting that many URLs into the comment when I'm this awake would be bad ;-)

    --
    GStreamer - The only way to stream!
    1. Re:Depends on what kind of camera by isaac_akira · · Score: 3, Informative

      There are lots of consumer-grade firewire webcams out there, and they should all work with linux (yay standards!). They use the same libdc1394 interface as the scientific cameras do. I'm using the Fire-i cam from unibrain.com, which cost about $130, but there are several others at that price range.

      This site has a lot more info on linux and firewire:

      http://linux1394.sourceforge.net/hcl.php

      p.s. it actuallys work. ;-) i'm running 320x240 YUV422 video into my image processing app at 30 frames a second. 640x480 works too, but it looks a bit grainy (the fault of my camera's lens and ccd) and that's too much info for my app to process anyway.