Newbie questions: live camera view with composite image + capturing images

Hello all,

I'm not certain if this is the best place to ask my newbie questions, but if it isn't, I hope that someone here can at least point me in the right direction.

I'm building an image processing system for medical purposes; simply said, it's designed for monitoring wounds and their healing process. Most of the actual processing will initially be done with the ImageMagick library -- but we need to capture images to process, of course, for which we ordered an industrial-type camera (the DBK 31BU03 from The Imaging Source, wich apparently has V4L2 support).

We don't have this camera yet, but expect it to arrive within a week -- right now, we're working with another camera on a Windows machine, but that's sheer hell: lousy picture quality, buggy camera firmware, buggy camera control software, and then there's Windows itself giving one nasty surprise after another. So we decided to try and make things work under Linux, over which I have considerably more control than Windows.

The goal for now is to have a live streaming camera view in a GUI window, overlaid with a pre-existing image (composite, I believe it's called); this image has the same dimensions and resolution as the camera picture, but must of course be (partially) transparent.

We also want to take image captures from this stream, without the composite image though.

Are there simple tools to accomplish this? I found a camera viewer application by the name of Camorama, which seems to fit the bill nicely (it can also create captures), but I can't see if it's capable of creating the composite live image we absolutely require.
I found some other viewer apps out there (e.g. camE), but most seem to have become obsolete long ago.

Or am I better off diving into the V4L2 sources right away, and code my way towards a solution? I'm afraid that my C programming skills are rather rusty after two decades, so it would be preferable to at least start off with some crude solutions -- any refinements can be made in the course of the following months.

We're also pondering to hire someone with better skills than me in this respect, so anyone interested may apply -- although we're primarily looking for someone here in the Netherlands.

Anyway, thanks already for any hints and replies, and I hope I'm not asking too much right away.

With best regards,

Richard Rasker

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On Mon, 2010-05-31 at 13:20 +0200, Richard Rasker wrote:

openCV, which is a great image processing tool kit, has some simple GUI creation tools. Maybe there is something there which is useful. IIRC, it can read from a v4l2 camera. Don't be put off by the web site. The tool kit is much better quality than the site might hint at.

The image processing offered by openCV is well beyond what IM does. And, openCV can optionally use intel's IPP library to get real speed improvements.

Roger Oberholtzer

OPQ Systems / Ramböll RST

Ramböll Sverige AB
Krukmakargatan 21
P.O. Box 17009
SE-104 62 Stockholm, Sweden

Office: Int +46 10-615 60 20
Mobile: Int +46 70-815 1696

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Op maandag 31-05-2010 om 14:28 uur [tijdzone +0200], schreef Roger Oberholtzer:

OpenCV indeed looks like an excellent starting point for this type of application -- and I also ordered the book "Learning OpenCV" right away :-)
I hope this will get me started along the right track -- and at the very least, it should get my rusty programming skills going again.

Thank you for this great tip!

Best regards,

Richard Rasker

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