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Firmware Hack Allows Video Analysis On a Canon Camera

Posted by timothy on from the turn-your-family-green-with-envy dept.

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.

10 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. CHDK by The+MAZZTer · · Score: 4, Informative

    I use CHDK on my own Canon PowerShot. Good stuff.

    1. Re: CHDK by kimvette · · Score: 3, Informative

      I use it on my S5 IS. I use the intervalometer, various grids (for composing level shots when it matters), the extended shutter modes (both slower and faster than the "stock" firmware allows) and of course the RGB histogram and on rare occasion raw. I don't use raw too often though because it slows the camere down a fair bit. However, CHDK is a wonderful tool and scripting it isn't too bad. The documentation is actually pretty good for a "young" open source project. In short, it makes point-and-shoot cameras usable where they otherwise wouldn't be, and where a point-and-shoot camera is preferable to a DSLR (such as when traveling), it can give you some of the capabilities you would normally turn to a DSLR for.

      I hope they manage to port it to the DSLRs, particularly the EOS 7D.

      --
      The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
    2. Re: CHDK by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      What's the 'newest' Camera that supports CHDK? Mine got stolen recently and I'd like something to replace it for times I don't want to lug around my SLR.

      I'm interested by that too as I've recently "acquired" a new camera.

  2. Interesting... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.).

    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 .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.

    1. Re:Interesting... by vlm · · Score: 3, Insightful

      What I find interesting about this is ... that consumer digicams would have enough general purpose punch to run anything much more than trivial scripts

      Check the feature list of typical modern "consumer"-ish digital cams. Marketing has decided that the average moron needs to be able to filter pics to look like a faded photograph, or put the picture inside an ornate picture frame, or cover up parts of the image with heart and caption overlays like those stupid "reality-TV" dating shows. The enormous resources required for stupid marketing tricks can be re-purposed to do much more interesting things... Which probably pisses off the marketing guys. Which I like.

      To a first approximation, the computing power required to store a pic is not much worse than the viewfinder display. And they don't seem to care about updating the video viewfinder continuously. So, it can't be too horrible of a computational task.

      --
      "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
    2. Re:Interesting... by timeOday · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The most computationally demanding onboard processing I've noticed (aside from video encoding, which surely uses a dedicated chip) is recognizing multiple faces in real-time, or tracking a moving object, to maintain focus. Far from the gimmicks you mention, these are very useful functions that just happen to require what amounts to video processing.

  3. Re:THEY ARE NOT CALLED "DIGICAMS". by Mike+Buddha · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
  4. Re:Zoneminder by davester666 · · Score: 3, Funny

    I wrote code for this so that my camera would draw a little red box around the faces of terrorists. It seems I'm surrounded by them.

    --
    Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
  5. Not alternative firmware by marcansoft · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:THEY ARE NOT CALLED "DIGICAMS". by timeOday · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.