Last modified: June 10, 2015
Contents
Editor: | Tim Altmann, Christian Brandt, Christoph Dalitz |
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Version: | 1.1.2 |
This toolkit is a toolkit for getting single video frames from a Webcam.
It is based on results from Tim Altmann's bachelor thesis.
T. Altmann: "Automatische Erkennung gezeichneter Figuren". Bachelor Thesis, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences, Krefeld, 2011
The toolkit can be used interactively from the Gamera GUI or automatically from python scripts:
- the user's guide gives usage examples for both ways
- the documentation of the Webcam class describes the provided API
The toolkit includes wrappers for different external webcam drivers for Linux, MacOS X, and Windows. If you want to add an additional driver, please have a look at the documentation on Driver Wrappers.
We have tested the toolkit on Linux, MacOS X and Windows. See the prerequisites listed below for additionally required third party libraries. If your operating system or video access library is not yet supported, please have a look on the documentation on Driver wrappers to learn how to add additional drivers.
The Webcam toolkit requires a working installation of the following software:
If you want to generate the documentation, you will need two additional third-party Python libraries:
Note
It is generally not necessary to generate the documentation because it is included in file releases of the toolkit.
To build and install this toolkit, go to the base directory of the toolkit distribution and run the setup.py script as follows:
# 1) compile python setup.py build # 2) install sudo python setup.py install
Command 1) compiles the toolkit from the sources and command 2) installs it. As the latter requires root privilegue, you need to use sudo on Linux and MacOS X. On Windows, sudo is not necessary.
If you want to regenerate the documentation, go to the doc directory and run the gendoc.py script. The output will be placed in the doc/html/ directory. The contents of this directory can be placed on a webserver for convenient viewing. Note that you must install the ttolkit before building the documentation. Otherwise gendoc.py will not find the class documentation.
The above installation with python setup.py install will install the toolkit system wide and thus requires root privileges. If you do not have root access (Linux) or are no sudoer (MacOS X), you can install the Webcam toolkit into your home directory. Note however that this also requires that Gamera is installed into your home directory. It is currently not possibole to install Gamera globally and only toolkits locally.
Here are the steps to install both Gamera and the webcam toolkit into ~/python:
# install Gamera locally mkdir ~/python python setup.py install --prefix=~/python # build and install the webcam toolkit locally export CFLAGS=-I~/python/include/python2.x/gamera python setup.py build python setup.py install --prefix=~/python
Moreover you should set the following environment variables in your ~/.profile:
# search path for python modules export PYTHONPATH=~/python/lib/python
If you have used the binary installer for Windows you can simply uninstall using the Windows Software Manager.
If you have installed the toolkit from the sources, you need to remove the installed files manually, because Python's distutils mechanism does not support uninstallation. These include
All python library files of this toolkit are installed into the gamera/toolkits/webcam subdirectory of the Python library folder. Thus it is sufficient to remove this directory for an uninstallation.
Where the python library folder is depends on your system and python version. Here are the folders that you need to remove on MacOS X and Ubuntu Linux ("2.x" stands for the python version; replace it with your actual version):
- MacOS X: /Library/Python/2.x/site-packages/gamera/toolkits/webcam
- Ubuntu Linux: /usr/local/lib/python2.x/dist-packages/gamera/toolkits/webcam
The documentation was written by Christian Brandt based on the documentation for some other toolkits by Christoph Dalitz. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this documentation under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA) v3.0. In addition, permission is granted to use and/or modify the code snippets from the documentation without restrictions.