Does it exist? Free Java Motion Detection Library

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Luc The Perverse - 29 Dec 2005 03:20 GMT

Hi I would like to design a home surveillance system which uses ethernet and
USB cameras.

I want to use motion detection to prevent returning useless feeds of
movies/stills which have nothing happening. I believe the key to sucessful
motion detection is detecting discrete differences (IE individual moving
bodies) rather than simply an aggregate of some numerical representation of
two image deltas. Easy in principle - but I have no idea how to begin
coding that. Perhaps simple statistics - and randomly distributed pixel
deltas are ignored?

Anyway - I was wondering if there were some quality free Java libraries for
motion detection - preferably open source.

My camera becomes exceptionally unpredictable in low light/no light - it
returns a faint static like image.

Any ideas?

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LTP

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Knute Johnson - 29 Dec 2005 04:12 GMT

> My camera becomes exceptionally unpredictable in low light/no light - it
> returns a faint static like image.

That's the noise in the camera and that is going to be the biggest
problem that you face I think.

> Any ideas?

Not a one but if you learn anything interesting, please pass it along.

Thanks,

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Knute Johnson
email s/nospam/knute/

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Luc The Perverse - 29 Dec 2005 04:50 GMT

>> My camera becomes exceptionally unpredictable in low light/no light - it
>> returns a faint static like image.
[quoted text clipped - 7 lines]
>
> Thanks,

My intuition tells me there is a way to measure the chaos of a change in a
picture and random distribution of pixel changes. Of course, I'm sure that
if your camera were watching a crowd of thousands of hustling people this
chaos number would be increased as well.

I have used software packages which handle this type of thing efficiently,
and some that are downright aweful (900 MB of black pictures comes to mind
from a night I left the program running.)

--
LTP

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Andrew Thompson - 29 Dec 2005 04:59 GMT

> I have used software packages which handle this type of thing efficiently,
> and some that are downright aweful ..

<http://www.google.com.au/search?q=definition+aweful>
<http://www.google.com.au/search?q=definition+awful>

..I take it you meant the latter?

;-)

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Andrew Thompson
physci, javasaver, 1point1c, lensescapes - athompson.info/andrew

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Luc The Perverse - 29 Dec 2005 05:05 GMT

>> I have used software packages which handle this type of thing
>> efficiently, and some that are downright aweful ..
[quoted text clipped - 5 lines]
>
> ;-)

Stupid E key gets hit by my fat finger sometimes.

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LTP

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Roedy Green - 29 Dec 2005 08:57 GMT

On Wed, 28 Dec 2005 20:20:03 -0700, "Luc The Perverse"
<sll_noSpamlicious_z_XXX_m@cc.usu.edu> wrote, quoted or indirectly
quoted someone who said :

>My camera becomes exceptionally unpredictable in low light/no light - it
>returns a faint static like image.

I wrote a system to control a bank of surveillance cameras. Usually
the came hardware does the motion detection. We ended up doing the
motion detect for dumb cameras using C. I was not involved in that
part. Both kinds of camera looked the same by the time they got to my
software.

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Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
http://mindprod.com Java custom programming, consulting and coaching.

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Luc The Perverse - 29 Dec 2005 19:47 GMT

>>My camera becomes exceptionally unpredictable in low light/no light - it
>>returns a faint static like image.
[quoted text clipped - 4 lines]
> part. Both kinds of camera looked the same by the time they got to my
> software.

ok . . . but why C?

I'm getting the idea that no good motion detection libraries are openly
available in Java or someone would have heard of one.

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LTP

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Roedy Green - 29 Dec 2005 19:55 GMT

On Thu, 29 Dec 2005 12:47:53 -0700, "Luc The Perverse"
<sll_noSpamlicious_z_XXX_m@cc.usu.edu> wrote, quoted or indirectly
quoted someone who said :

>ok . . . but why C?

I think it was the availability of a high speed image processing
library. The server software was written in C, so it would fit in
better. This software had to run on the server side. The guy in
charge was more familiar with C and he wrote that part.

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Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
http://mindprod.com Java custom programming, consulting and coaching.

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Luke Meyers - 29 Dec 2005 23:53 GMT

> Anyway - I was wondering if there were some quality free Java libraries for
> motion detection - preferably open source.
>
> Any ideas?

I think you'll probably have more luck framing it as a "computer
vision" problem than a "motion detection" problem. The former is an
active field of research, the latter more of a particular application,
often implemented in hardware (e.g. IR, not just video cameras).
Googling the first one may be more fruitful -- there's bound to be some
published libraries used in research or something, at the very least.

Of course, it might not be in Java, but that's an orthogonal
constraint, really.

Luke (also perverse)

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Does it exist? Free Java Motion Detection Library

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