[PyConTW 2012] Panoramic Video in Environmental Monitoring by Jay William Johnson
Channel: TJWei
Date: 02/07/2012

Jay William Johnson

Jay William Johnson is enrolled in the Earth Sciences Masters Degree program at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, using Python on a project in the remote sensing lab in the Earth Sciences department. He has been programming in Python for a year now, having a few years experience with Java and IDL before Python.

Panoramic Video in Environmental Monitoring -- Software Development and Applications, Talk Summary:

Our lab is working on panoramic video taken with the Ladybug3 Spherical Camera for environmental monitoring. We used python to write a module to preprocess the video data, including working with ctypes to create a wrapper module for the Ladybug API and using OpenCV and SIFT to correct GPS data that is embedded in the video. This talk will end with image time-series creation and their applications.

This project is to write software that processes panoramic video for environmental monitoring. The instrument used in this project is an omnidirectional video camera system produced by Point Grey Research called Ladybug3 Spherical Camera. For the environment monitoring applications we had in mind, we needed to first develop software to preprocess the recorded video data and to access the video images. The steps towards preprocessing the panoramic video included: using the ctypes library in creating a wrapper module for the Ladybug API (C/C++) that was provided with the Ladybug3 system, writing a wrapper module for managing the SIFT program data, and resolving the missing coordinate data due to dropped video frames and dropped GPS receiver data. Correcting and correlating coordinate data with the video gives us positions and bearings of each video frame, which then makes it easy to apply OpenCV or SIFT in scene matching, i.e., finding the closest matching view angle between multiple videos taken at different times. Single images or a time-series of images can also be published to a web-based GIS system along with analysis results.