[pygame] Webcam, OpenCV and Python/Pygame

[Chris Hager <chris@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

On the pygame gsoc ideas page i saw the webcam project to integrate 
computer vision. I'm an enthusiastic pygame developer myself, mostly for 
the XO laptop. I am also soc mentor for OLPC and we have a very 
interesting OpenCV proposal.

Both the student and I had previous contact with OpenCV and are very 
enthusiastic about the possibilities of this library (they are so quick, 
and run very well on the XO). Here is a link to Nirav's current 
experiments: http://eclecti.cc/olpc

Here is a piece from the proposal draft:

   My proposal is thus for the creation of an interface layer between
   the v4l2 driver in the kernel and Sugar Activities. This interface
   would include functions to abstract and simplify basic and complex
   vision processes and algorithms. These would include colorspace
   conversions, thresholding, tracking connected components,
   convolving, motion tracking, and pattern recognition. The library
   itself could be from a well developed project like OpenCV to
   minimize code duplication. The next step is to build example
   Activities to demonstrate and document ways to make use of vision
   processing. The first is adding vision to an Activity like Colors!
   or Bounce to show how it can augment an existing experience. The
   second is creating a simple Activity from scratch to show how vision
   can work itself, such as xeyes with face tracking. Beyond that, with
   the toolkit, anyone interested could write Activities for motion
   based games, sign language recognition, a cartoon-based video chat,
   face detection and recognition, and so on.


We would be delighted to discuss the possibilities of this project, also 
regarding pygame and what ideas you would have.

Regards from Vienna,
- Chris

--
\___/    Chris Hager
|___|    GSoC '08 Mentor for OLPC -- http://wiki.laptop.org
 \___\   Elements Developer -- http://elements.linuxuser.at