Gamera Addon: Webcam Toolkit
This is a Gamera toolkit for automatically taking snapshots from a webcam or document camera. It is based on the Gamera framework and requires a working Gamera installation.
About the Webcam toolkit
The Webcam Toolkit provides python library functions for querying attached video devices (like a webcam or a document camera) and for obtaining snapshots as Gamera images. It provides:
- wrappers around video drivers for MacOS X, Linux, and Windows
- a mechanism for adding new wrappers around video drivers
- integration into the Gamera GUI
- library functions for taking snapshots automatically from a python script
Prerequisites
As this is a Gamera toolkit, it obviously requires a working installation of Gamera. Moreover, hardware access to the camera relies on one of the following third party libraries:
- On MacOS X, the QuickTime framework is used. As this is part of the operating system, no additional software is required.
- On Linux, you need Video4Linux. This is typically included in your Linux distribution in the packages libv4l and libv4l-dev.
- On Windows, the python library VideoCapture is used. As all necessary library files are included with the Webcam toolkit, this library does not need to be installed. You must however install the Python Imaging Library, because it is used for converting the webcam frames to Gamera images.
Documentation
A detailed documentation is included with the source code package in the subdirectory doc/html. A TGZ archive of this docs can also be downloaded here: webcam-doc.tar.gz
Authors and Acknowledgements
The authors of the Webcam toolkit are:
Software Download
The Webcam toolkit and its source code are freely distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Note that the toolkit requires a working installation of Gamera. Available file releases are:
- Source code for all platforms (version 1.1.0, Nov 29, 2011)
- Windows binary installer for Python 2.5 (version 1.0.0, May 16, 2011)
For release notes, see the file CHANGES. For installation and usage instructions see the file doc/html/index.html in the source package. When all prerequisites are installed, installation simply requires typing
python setup.py build && sudo python setup.py install