Webcam fun with Flash
We are well on the way to putting together a prototype of a motion-controlled environment in Flash using the webcam. The thinking is to capture video from the webcam, and then periodically call a server backend that uses AForge.NET for image processing and AI, and then present data back to the Flash client that can then be used for UI interaction or something similar. draw.logic blog has a decent little rundown of webcam capture and simple motion detection using Actionscript, and Mr doob has a nice example of an arty 3D transform of webcam content. There are a few other examples out there, but no one really seems to have taken the bull by the horns and tried to harness the image content in real time to do something more useful. There are challenges of course, but the possibilities are exciting. If we can build even a simple feedback system that is robust and has adequate accuracy, the applications will surely follow.
Sounds very interesting I look forward to trying it out. I too am in the middle of creating webcam interaction in Flash using AS3. Although, mine is more audio based with only some simple animations in Flash for aesthetics. Having some problems with a few things and latency wondering if you have any advice? Perhaps the AForge.Net route is a better option :S
Comment by Gary — April 21, 2008 @ 6:23 am
I have abandoned the idea of posting images in real-time back the server for processing … the cost in traffic and latency is too steep. The approach that seems most promising now is to do processing in AS, using built-in functions to isolate motion by blending sequential images and getting colour bounds, then tracking the evolution of the identified motion areas over time.
Comment by Shourov Bhattacharya — April 22, 2008 @ 12:43 am
I’ll second Gary’s comment; it sounds very interesting. I’ve been playing with motion detection and tracking in as3 as well. There seems to be many different approaches being tried, but I suppose it it inevitable that each have their respective strengths and weakness.
I’ll post some code soon as well, and look forward to seeing what you come up with. Thanks for the post.
http://blog.soulwire.co.uk/flash/actionscript-3/webcam-motion-detection-tracking/
Comment by Justin — June 7, 2008 @ 1:32 pm
We have launched our first basic prototype of gesture recognition and motion detection.
Comment by Shourov Bhattacharya — June 17, 2008 @ 6:31 am