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.

HornetsEye is maybe the first free software project providing a solid platform for implementing real-time computer vision software in a scripting language. The platform potentially could be used in robotic applications, industrial automation as well as in microscopy and the life sciences.

Download

Check the installation instructions on how to obtain and install HornetsEye.

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:

Qt4-QtRuby, Korundum: QtRuby and Korundum can be used to develop graphical user interfaces and desktop applications with Qt4.
Xine: Using Xine one can read virtually any video file and it is even possible to read streaming videos.
MPlayer: MPlayer is a player which can be used to read video files under GNU/Linux as well as Microsoft Windows.
NArray: Masahiro Tanaka's NArray is an implementation of n-dimensional arrays for Ruby.
FFTW. The fftw-library can is maybe the fastest library for performing discrete Fourier transforms. It can be invoked by using Masahiro Tanaka's fftw3 extension.
RMagick: The RMagick Ruby-extension allows to use the powerful Magick++ library in Ruby for loading and saving images.
libdc1394: Using libdc1394 one can make use of a large choice of firewire digital cameras.
OpenEXR: The OpenEXR library is used for saving and loading high dynamic range images.
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.
STL: The software makes use of the Standard Template Library
Ruby programming language
Bazaar: Bazaar is used for version control.
Gcc: gcc is the C++ compiler of the GNU project.
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.
Natural Docs: Natural Docs is used to create the HTML documentation.
NSIS: The Windows installer is generated with Nullsoft Scriptable Install System.
DotGNU: The JIT library of the DotGNU project is repurposed for generating image processing code at runtime.