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Firmware Hack Allows Video Analysis On a Canon Camera
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from the University of Liege in Belgium have been able to perform real-time video analysis on a regular Canon digicam (video link) without any hardware modification. The results are shown directly on the digicam's screen. They use a hacked version of a popular open-source alternative firmware for Canon cameras: CHDK. This is a proof-of-concept that computer vision algorithms can now be embedded on regular Canon digicams with little effort (CHDK is coded in C). What other popular vision algorithms could be implemented? For what purpose?" You can get some idea about ViBe from this abstract at IEEE; basically, it allows background extraction in moving images.
I've been playing around with Zoneminder a bit & this could be a way to use decentralized cheap cameras to send events to a ZM server. Pretty neat.
I use CHDK on my own Canon PowerShot. Good stuff.
What I find interesting about this is not so much that the code can be loaded(since the CHDK project already did that job, and has had it working for some time now); but that consumer digicams would have enough general purpose punch to run anything much more than trivial scripts that more or less emulate series of button presses(which can be extremely useful, for time lapse, auto bracketing, etc, etc.).
.jpeg form, or encoding video) would be done with largely fixed function hardware, with just a little bit of general purpose computer slapped on to handle UI, user input, and tweak the settings of the encoder units. Apparently, the general purpose units have more punch than I thought.
Given the sheer number that are produced, and the fairly tight battery life constraints, I would have assumed that most of the heavy lifting(crunching raw sensor data to
I'm sure "video analysis" means something more concrete to those in the know (or not), but I can't shake off the feeling that it's all blahblahblah with no meaning other than to generate more blahblahblah.
OpenCV
Integrating Vision Toolkit
Think these libraries but on the camera. You take an image, you process HSV, contrast, and a bunch of other data to do shape detections, motion detection, etc.
I call it a Cami-DigiCam Camcorder. It's so important to get the terminology right when you don't know anything else.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
OpenCV has C interfaces and there are more that have some C code libraries. Really the coding challenge would be building the wrappers to utilize those libraries with your camera's hardware (I assume provided through CHDK APIs). My vote is for a nifty KLT implementation that allows me to take a video and extract a huge wide pan image in post processing on the camera.
My work here is dung.
I told you not to waste time on slashdot again. You on my list, now.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Digicam is a perfectly cromulent word. You may want to look into the prescription/description debate to understand everyone thinks you are a ridiculous buffoon.
Also, I resent the implication that I ride a Harley.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It's worth pointing out that CHDK isn't a hacked firmware (that would probably not be legally redistributable), nor is it an alternative firmware (that would be too much work). CHDK is an add-on to the existing firmware, that works by piggibacking on its OS, hooking functions, and spawning off extra processes on the camera's RTOS. This is what makes it so great: you get the original funcionality of the camera plus extra stuff, and you don't have to wait for the developers to add what already came with your camera anyway.
If you need an algorithm to identify which girls are attractive, then you don't need an attractive girl.
Right, the new word for "digital camera" is "camera." If you mention to a friend that your camera battery is dead, would they still ask whether you can advance the film manually? No. The vast majority of cameras made, sold, and used today are digital cameras, so that is what the word has come to mean.
Because they are SLRs. Their firmware can do almost all CHDK can do. A lot of work and little gain, plus risk of bricking an expensive camera. The main focus of CHDK is cheapest idiotekameras, because the difference it makes is really huge.
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You can check our dedicated webpage.
It features downloadable binaries for windows and linux (thanks to wine).
Isn't this when somebody is supposed to chime in with a meme?
In Korea only old people use film? ...
In Soviet Russia film uses you?
Or maybe just imagine a Beowulf cluster of hacked Canon cameras
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I just checked the tripod mount on my S90, and it looks like it's smack bang in the centre of the lens.
As for the pop-out flash, it's motorised. I don't know if that makes it more os less robust, but there you go.
I've read that the S90 is basically the same as the G11 but with a different body and lens, which gives me hope that CHDK will be available for the S90 soon, since it already is for the G11. It does shoot RAW out of the box, though. You won't need CHDK for that.
No, most photographers that refer to a non-SLR digital camera refer to it as a PnS (Point and Shoot) and dSLR as just "SLR" as in most digital forums it's automatically assumed you're running a digital camera opposed to film.
I still take superior pictures with my Minolta X-700, no Photoshop needed afterwards.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.