November 23, 2009

Temporary diversion

by Andrey Filippov

Not much progress with the 10373 board in the last 3 weeks – just cleaned up debug wiring and prepared the board for the visit from SlimLogic Ltd. The software for the 373 camera is going to be based on OpenEmbedded and I would like to set up everything correctly before getting deep in the modifying the existent codebase.

Meanwhile we tested the redesigned sensor board (will work with the 373 camera too) to make it smaller. All the current sensor boards (but the ones with a large Kodak CCD) were the same size – 31.4mm x 31.4mm – it did not change since the times of old Zoran 1.3MPix sensor. Since then the sensors became smaller and less components were needed for the power conditioning too.

The sensor board size is especially important for the panoramic video were it is desirable to keep lenses as close together as possible to reduce the effect of the parallax. For the still imagery panoramic photos it is possible to rotate a camera precisely around the entrance pupil of the camera lens, but for the video (or even some imagery) it is not a solution.
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November 12, 2009

Interfacing Elphel cameras with GStreamer, OpenCV, OpenGL/GLSL and python. Create custom video processing plugins and get profit of DSP and GPU based optimization.

by Alexandre

Introduction:

The aim of this article is to describe how to use Elphel cameras with GStreamer from simple pipeline to a complex python software integration using OpenCV and other optimized video processing blocks. All the examples on this page are Free Software and are available as templates for your own application. Most of the described and linked software are available under GNU GPL, GNU LGPL and BSD-like licenses.

I demonstrate the use of the GStreamer framework with Elphel NC353L cameras series, but most of the examples can be used with (or without) any camera by replacing the RTSP source by a v4l2, dv, gnomevfs, videotest, gltest or file source.

The GStreamer framework itself, as most of the modules, is available under the GNU LGPL license, thuse it is perfectly suitable for both Free Software and proprietary product integration.
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