Revision as of 20:46, 31 July 2011

Poster for the 2008 AVA meeting in Bristol

Conference presentation Real-time Computer Vision With Ruby presented at OSCON 2008

Scanning barcodes with a webcam (also available as 6.9 MB DivX4 video)

Seminar presentation Machine vision and device integration with the Ruby Programming Language

New video demonstrating HornetsEye capabilities (available as 45.6 MByte H.264-video)

Introduction

HornetsEye is a Ruby-extension for developing video processing and real-time computer vision software under GNU/Linux offering interfaces to do image- and video-I/O with RMagick, Xine, firewire digital camera, and video for Linux. A new class of unprecedented solutions and a new way of working becomes conceivable when applying a dynamically typed, object-oriented language like Ruby to computer vision.

Software Engineering

HornetsEye brings the functionality of existing powerful free software packages into Ruby. HornetsEye also tries to make existing Ruby extension operate with each other to enable the development of novel solutions:

1. Qt4-QtRuby, Korundum: QtRuby and Korundum can be used to develop graphical user interfaces and desktop applications with Qt4 and KDE4.
2. Xine: Using Xine one can read virtually any video file and it is even possible to read streaming videos.
3. MPlayer: MPlayer is a player which can be used to read video files under GNU/Linux as well as Microsoft Windows.
4. Mesa: Mesa is used for OpenGL-accelerated display of images.
5. X.Org: X.Org is used for 24-bit true colour display as well as for hardware accelerated video display under GNU/Linux
6. Gnuplot: Gnuplot is used for plotting histograms and 3D profiles.
7. NArray: There are datatype conversions to make use of Masahiro Tanaka's NArray. NArray is an implementation of n-dimensional arrays for Ruby.
8. OpenCV: There are datatype conversions to make use of OpenCV::CvMat. OpenCV can be used from within Ruby using Masakazu Yonekura's OpenCV Ruby-extension.
9. FFTW. The fftw-library can is maybe the fastest library for performing discrete Fourier transforms.
10. RMagick: The RMagick Ruby-extension allows to use the powerful Magick++ library in Ruby for loading and saving images.
11. libdc1394: Using libdc1394 one can make use of a large choice of firewire digital cameras.
12. OpenEXR: The OpenEXR library is used for saving and loading high dynamic range images.
13. Boost: The Boost Library offers smart pointers to do exception safe programming, multi-dimensional arrays, template meta-programming, abstract data types for linear algebra and many other programming concepts. The Boost library is going to be part of a future C++ standard.
14. STL: The software makes use of the Standard Template Library
15. Ruby programming language
16. Bazaar: Bazaar is used for version control. You can access the repository on the Launchpad site (see Bazaar Quick Start Card (PDF, PNG) or Bazaar User Guide if you want to know more about using Bazaar).
17. Gcc: gcc is the C++ compiler of the GNU project.
18. autoconf, automake and make: make, autoconf and automake are used to configure and perform the build of the software on GNU/Linux as well as Microsoft Windows.
19. Natural Docs: Natural Docs is used to create the HTML documentation.
20. NSIS: The Windows installer is generated with Nullsoft Scriptable Install System.
21. DotGNU: The JIT library of the DotGNU project is repurposed for generating image processing code at runtime.

See Also

• Interactive Presentation Software
• Just-in-time compiler
• Lucas-Kanade tracker
• Hypercomplex Wavelets
• Qt4-QtRuby installer for Microsoft Windows
• TEM vision software
• Mimas

External Links

• HornetsEye homepage
• HornetsEye at Rubyforge
• HornetsEye at Sourceforge
• SWIG (Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator)