real-time camera acquisition and processing, howto

Stefan_Karlsson · February 3, 2019, 1:38pm

This is the same issue that is covered by my stackoverflow post. I have searched to best of my ability online, especially this discourse and stackoverflow.

I am new to Julia. I want to use the REPL to learn, and then demo its capability.

I am on Ubuntu 16.04, installed the Julia 1.03 LTS build (downloaded binaries), and installed all packages from the package handler system from the REPL interface. Only two packages added so far: VideoIO and ImageViewer.

I want to show real-time processing of a camera feed. I am using a usb camera (video4linux2).
First impression of running VideioIO.viewCamera(): immediate crash. The interface to ImageViewer seems broken. I fixed that by making the following:

in “myViewCam.jl”:

module myViewCam
export myView

import VideoIO, ImageView;

function myView() 
        camera = VideoIO.opencamera();
        buf = VideoIO.read(camera);
        guidict = ImageView.imshow(buf);
        while !eof(camera)
            VideoIO.read!(camera, buf);
            ImageView.imshow(guidict["gui"]["canvas"], buf);
            sleep(0.00001);
        end
    end
end

which I run by:

include("myViewCam.jl");
myViewCam.myView();

This will display the videostream in a window, with initially 3 or 4 second lag. The lag evens out over time, and lands steadily on about 0.5 seconds. If I increase the sleep duration in the loop, the CPU can go lower useage, say 90% or so without frame-loss, but it then does not reduce the lag time over time.

Sukera · February 3, 2019, 6:38pm

Is there a concrete question here? What sort of error/crash do you get when running just VideoIO.viewCamera()?

mkborregaard · February 3, 2019, 6:46pm

I think the question is how to avoid the lag, so you can display the video in real time. I think either @ssfrr or @ianshmean were working with real-time video capture at some point?

cdsousa · February 3, 2019, 9:41pm

Hi, I’m not actually answering anything but I just want to say that I used to use a tiny interface to OpenCV capture C API I created and am now making it public at https://gist.github.com/cdsousa/5c707f767cd766bb9df79f837b90a1a9. It may help (or not).

Stefan_Karlsson · February 4, 2019, 1:14pm

@Sukera, I am not sure I can edit the post, the GUI tells me it will discard my post. The question is: How do I achieve low lag, and low cpu camera acquisition, so I can do real-time video processing in Julia?

Stefan_Karlsson · February 4, 2019, 1:14pm

@Sukera, the behaviour of the viewcam() (I spelled it wrong before) is as follows. It pops up a single frame of the camera in a window, and then crashes with the following error message:

ERROR: MethodError: no method matching imshow(::Pair{String,Any}, ::PermutedDimsArray{ColorTypes.RGB{FixedPointNumbers.Normed{UInt8,8}},2,(2, 1),(2, 1),Array{ColorTypes.RGB{FixedPointNumbers.Normed{UInt8,8}},2}}; flipx=true, interactive=false)

The code in original viewcam attempts to retrieve a canvas from an ImageView call but it doesnt work. I am guessing it is due to an outdated interface to ImageView, dunno really. I just hacked something together that seems right in the code i posted. Seeing its my first adventure into Julia, I am sure I am doing all things wrong.

Stefan_Karlsson · February 4, 2019, 1:14pm

@mkborregaard and @cdsousa, thanks for helping. I have been thinking about the solution of trying to hook this up with OpenCV (common ground for me). I have heard that Julias strenghts include easy and efficient combination with c++ libs. Holding off with that for a little while longer, to see if this approach works out first.

ianshmean · February 4, 2019, 4:02pm

Indeed! This is the Makie approach I arrived at, with dummy data generated by rand!() and an efficient downsampling approach for lower resolution previews.

Also there’s a preview scalefactor speed testing example below which demonstrates that on my setup downsampling is only beneficial at lower than a ~0.5 preview scale factor

using Random #For generating fake live video data
using Makie, ImageTransformations, Interpolations, Colors, FixedPointNumbers

nframes = 500
previewscalefactor = 0.2

img = rand(UInt8,1536,2048) #Raw image
scene = Scene(resolution = (size(img,2),size(img,1)),colormap=Reverse(:Greys)) #Reverse colormap to match normal greyscale image representation 

preview_size = (round(Int,size(img,1)*previewscalefactor), round(Int,size(img,2)*previewscalefactor))
#Lower resolution preview, with efficient downsampling
buff = zeros(N0f8, preview_size[1],preview_size[2])
itp = interpolate!(reinterpret(N0f8, img), BSpline(Linear()))
#Set up Makie scene for preview
hmap = heatmap!(scene, buff, show_axis = false, scale_plot = false)[end]
display(scene)

#Test dummy image capture with preview
t = @elapsed for i = 1:nframes
    rand!(img)     # aquire new data into raw image array
    ImageTransformations.imresize!(buff, itp)
    hmap[1] = buff
    yield()
end
println("Video generation & live preview at ",previewscalefactor," scale: ",round(nframes/t,digits=1)," FPS")

Video generation & live preview at 0.2 scale: 286.0 FPS

Testing preview scale factor

using Random #For generating fake live video data
using Makie, ImageTransformations, Interpolations, Colors, FixedPointNumbers

nframes = 500
img = rand(UInt8,1536,2048) #Raw image

#First test dummy image capture only
t = @elapsed for i = 1:nframes
    rand!(img)     # aquire new data into raw image array
end
println("Video generation: ",round(nframes/t,digits=1)," FPS")

for previewscalefactor in [1,0.5,0.25,0.1]
    scene = Scene(resolution = (size(img,2),size(img,1)),colormap=Reverse(:Greys)) #Reverse colormap to match normal greyscale image representation 
    if previewscalefactor != 1
        #Lower resolution preview, with efficient downsampling
        preview_size = (round(Int,size(img,1)*previewscalefactor), round(Int,size(img,2)*previewscalefactor))
        buff = zeros(N0f8, preview_size[1],preview_size[2])
        itp = interpolate!(reinterpret(N0f8, img), BSpline(Linear()))
        #Set up Makie scene for preview
        hmap = heatmap!(scene, buff, show_axis = false, scale_plot = false)[end]
    else
        hmap = heatmap!(scene, img, show_axis = false, scale_plot = false)[end]
    end

    display(scene)

    #Test dummy image capture with preview
    t = @elapsed for i = 1:nframes
        rand!(img)     # aquire new data into raw image array
        if previewscalefactor !=1
            ImageTransformations.imresize!(buff, itp)
            hmap[1] = buff
        else
            hmap[1] = img
        end
        yield()
    end
    println("Video generation & live preview at ",previewscalefactor," scale: ",round(nframes/t,digits=1)," FPS")
end

Video generation: 2137.1 FPS
Video generation & live preview at 1.0 scale: 67.0 FPS
Video generation & live preview at 0.5 scale: 60.8 FPS
Video generation & live preview at 0.25 scale: 207.1 FPS
Video generation & live preview at 0.1 scale: 536.4 FPS

johnh · February 4, 2019, 4:36pm

@Stefan_Karlsson What a marvellous thread. I have been working with installing VideoIO on and off for two years I think. Look at the documentation - it says there is a simple high level interface.
I may be out of order here, but I think your question is really saying - there is a general purpose utility for reading video, but it turns out to be slow. How then do we access hardware devices with Julia? I guess that becomes much more specific to the hardware and OS, and as @cdsousa says probably involves wrapping some C code.
But lets not give up - Julia is growing.

ianshmean · February 4, 2019, 4:41pm

I agree. Given it’s relevance here I thought I’d plug that we started up a video slack channel in the julia slack a few weeks back, focused on building out VideoIO’s functionality primarily.

Also, @samuelpowell’s spinnaker.jl package for PointGrey cameras is a nice example of camera interaction that’s currently being built out. I’ve even got that working right out of the box on the ARMv8 build of 1.0.3 on a raspberry pi style board (Rock64) GitHub - samuelpowell/Spinnaker.jl: A Julia interface to the FLIR/PointGrey Spinnaker SDK

Stefan_Karlsson · February 4, 2019, 8:28pm

@ianshmean and @johnh, thanks for your kind words. Note that what I want are 2 things:

low-latency camera acquisition and
low drain on the hardware resources.

What I am hoping to achieve (before either it or I am too old ), is to port my Matlab real-time optical flow toolbox into Julia, with a free license.

Stefan_Karlsson · February 4, 2019, 8:43pm

Regarding work on VideoIO, here is a wish list from me:

low latency and low cpu load acquistion for video4linux devices (maybe same issue with directShow, havent tried windows)
streaming video from IP cameras. Just motion jpeg over tcp/IP, http would be a good feature for starters.
genicam, (usb3vision and GigE vision cameras)

if VideoIO was to support genicam devices (usb3vision and gigE vision cameras). It would really open up for a new crowd of engineers and researchers.

stemann · March 19, 2019, 7:35pm

See also Cameras.jl - we should have a generic camera interface – similar to GenICam, but even more generic, to include consumer hardware, such that a GenICamCamera is a sub-type of an abstract Camera.

Low latency and low CPU load is obviously needed - even for consumer cameras: In order to achieve this, dynamic memory allocation must be avoided - one solution: ResourcePools.jl

In a short while, I will publish a Basler Pylon Camera-implementation achieving low-latency by statically allocating images - based on pylon_julia_wrapper, Cameras.jl and ResourcePools.jl.

Here’s a sample of acquiring images (using the raw wrapper) - in an asynchronous-friendly way – i.e. without blocking the calling thread unnecessarily: pylon_julia_wrapper/grab_async.jl at master · IHPSystems/pylon_julia_wrapper · GitHub

dehann · March 31, 2020, 8:21pm

For reference, similar to answer/comment in original Stack Overflow post – for anyone looking for a Video4Linux.jl wrapper: GitHub - Affie/Video4Linux.jl: Julia interface for video4linux

Using this wrapper in a multi-threaded way should be doable.

Stefan_Karlsson · November 11, 2020, 8:56am

This shuts down any potential demos of how efficient Julia is for real-time video-processing. Still hopefully waiting.

SCD · February 1, 2021, 1:44pm

@stemann Can you please tell me where to find the a summary of latest capability of Julia Pylon wrap?

Also, I’m trying to move away from Matlab for machine vision applications and just graduated from Jane’s intro tutorial. I would like to know the current capability with regard to porting julia applications in compiled (executable) form. Can you please advise some resources or where to look for?

Thanks.

stemann · May 7, 2021, 12:40pm

Cf. https://github.com/IHPSystems/PylonCameras.jl