Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Java Image Comparison - Motion Detection

So this is what I've managed to do with some simple image comparison thus far... I've repackaged it all to try make some sense of it; The sample apps reside in com.b22222.app.webcam; The most informative app probably being WebCamState.java

I've simply zipped my source folder. I use eclipse at this present time and have left my project settings file in the archive. The sample apps require java's JMF to be installed on the system.


What are my goals?
I want to design some kind of (physical) contact free input system; This system should be as functional as, or more than the standard keyboard and mouse. Now that's the main goal... A bunch of other possibilities have come alive since I've been tinkering around. I can now set my camera facing the front door and get email alerts at work (with pictures of the culprit) when motion is detected at home. I've also got plans in the pipe to design a kinetic sculpture that reacts to motion in front of it. The list continues.

Where am I now?
I can continually read from a live stream of webcam video and dismantle the picture into more pliable data. With this data I can pick up motion hotspots, primitive edge detection (particularly bad on blunt edges), and some noise reduction. All this is demo'ed in the attached library of code. Please keep this in mind that I develop in spare time by myself who has never studied image or video in large depth - I mostly only design as much I need to progress onto my next goal.

Most general application settings end up in my settings.ini file. This might be a good place to start tinkering with values if you want to poke and prod my library. I had tried to use a neural network to interpret webcam input but it never really worked. I have left my code there in case I revisit that idea. The neural net library I used is called Joone and is freely downloadable.

Details of how I dismantle an image:
Although I have copied the code in several places throughout, the best piece of code to reference this process is probably com.b22222.routine.ImageHelper.
A BufferedImage (Raw Image pixel data) is drawn from the webcam source. This image is converted into what I called a State object. A State is simply a 2d array of integers. At the moment this array represents the brightness on the pixels from the image. (I plan to somehow incorporate hue difference into this as well in the future.) From here you should partly forget that you are working with images, but rather arrays of numbers. I did this so that from here our code could be used for any map of numbers - Say cloud patterns, or temperature maps. (Not that I ever intend to go down this road myself)

A Comparison is an object drawn from the difference of two States. If I remember correctly I just subtracted one array from the other. We now have a new array of numbers representing the difference between to images. This may help two fold; a) I'm obviously searching for motion, and b) if 70% of an image rarely changes then we want to consciously ignore it.

Next a primitive EdgeDetector object can process the change map to emphasize the edges of island and lines. This is not an essential stage and could quite likely be taken out if it is silencing too much useful data.

After that I found two statistics of the data in the array: The average, and the *standard-deviation. Then using these multiplied by factors specified in the settings file, if the value in the array is not greater than the average + std-dev, then it is set to zero. This helps clean up small noise generated through subtle light differences, etc.

The array that is now left contains data that is somewhat usefull to me. And hopefully you :-)

*Ps: I always mixed up standard deviation and variance. It's one of the two. I think.

This can all be seen in action in the com.b22222.app.webcam.WebCamState class.
Instructions for use: Run the app. Wait for the video feed to register in the left window. (Mine usually takes a few seconds). Then click the left button titled 'Capture Base Image'. This will set the image to compare against for motion detection. Now click the right button titled 'Start Compare...'.

Here is a demo of when I tuned my settings to pick up my black pen against a white wall. (The red circles are rendered onto the image in areas of interest. The double green circle is the center of gravity of the points of interest)


What do I plan on doing next?
Creating a more 'opaque' input interface. This interface would expose some events and hide all of the workings by the libraries described above. This interface will most likely provide some kind of coordinate information. I would also like to provide, but have no idea how, a polygon best representing the image input.

Long term?
I'm thinking of a menu/list based input system. A user would navigate from menu to menu choosing options which would either automate keyboard input or mouse input. This is in part a resignation because I don't think getting pixel perfect mouse positioning will be viable with webcam input; but storing keyboard/mouse inputs in templates, sequences and menus could reduce work for repetitive actions normally done on these devices.

In case you missed it up top, this is the source code.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

hi
am starting a tesis

and ai need some help with
motion tracking

my email is lamentoeroico@gmail.com

thanks

Realtime Daddy said...

Just thought I'd thank you! I have some security cameras at home, I have built a java app that downloads the videos, and displays meta data (time, duration, etc) and now thanks to you process each one for motion! WAAAY better than watching hours of video to see if somebody is poking around the yard at night... so many thanks to you... and given your like 4th or so on good search for java and motion, i image there are thousands of other people that should be thanking you too :)

splttingatms said...

How do you import the source code into Eclipse? I tried "Existing Projects into Workspace" but that did not work.

Unknown said...

This is how I mounted my project folder when moving between machines:
- File > New > Java Project
- Select 'Create project from existing source'.
- Browse (Browse to the relevant target folder)
- Choose OK
- You can then change the project name if you wish.
- Then 'Next' to the end, or click 'Finish'

Again: This is how I've moved my source around my machines,.. If there is a more correct way of doing this then I'm unaware of it (Never needed it).

// Pat.

iheb said...

i tryed to use your source code like u said (create a project from existing source)

but it i try to compile it it said that the .class files dont exists(and he is write because the folder bin dont exists)

i hope u respond me

thanks

Unknown said...

Compiling code is the process of creating those .class files. Make sure that you also have Java's JMF library installed. You'll probably need to do the once over in the project settings to make sure all referenced libraries can be found etc. I'm not much of an Eclipse pro, so don't know what else to suggest.

Andrea B. said...

The project looks really interesting!
Do you have any news in the last 2 years?
Best regards,
Andrea

Unknown said...

i havent done enough yet to call it a new version. i also haven't worked on this idea for quite a while now; can't believe i started this two years ago!.. feels like 2 months.

Unknown said...

Total respect!! Great work.. I have a comment though. Your work (as aowsome as it is now) would be SUPREMELY AWOSOME if you reach a level where you can supply a photo and search for in a surrounding context (Example: provide a photo for a face and your code looks for that face in a photo for a room or a crowd or any other context). This could be challengin as the face may be not exactly the same as the reference (the face might be angry smiling or simply looking to the side). Also, it might be in a smaller size. Also, it might be in the corner or in the middle. I think that if u could enhance the shapes identifying functionality that u spoke of (that u said u will rule out) is a first step of this complex challenge (after identifying the shape, that region surrounding it is only compared for the original one (reducing complexity)).. Anyways, great works.. Very helpful.. Thansk a lot

dingdong said...

Say I want to use this code, however dont want to use a webcam, instead detect motion in a series of frames in a 500 frame sequence. How would I do that?

Anonymous said...

Have you looked at the free Java package developed by NIH - ImageJ? It is both an application (to use manually) and a library.

See http://serc.carleton.edu/eyesinthesky2/week2/using_imagej_part1.html and http://imagej.1557.x6.nabble.com/Compare-two-gray-value-pictures-td3687310.html.