unicap-imaging.org blog

Finally an update

After a long time without updates ( Happy New Year, btw! ), I finally released a new version of unicap (0.9.8 ). With this release, I split the old single unicap package in three packages: libunicap, libucil and libunicapgtk. One main reason for the delay in new releases was that a change in one component on my development version prevented the release of a new version even if eg. libunicapgtk was updated and in a stable state.

In the future, there will be independent releases for each of these packages which will hopefully reduce the time between releases.

Strict GPL licensing

In the past I offered a commercial license option which allowed the closed source usage of unicap. But since I do not work on unicap for a living and providing a full commercial support for unicap takes away too much time from development, I decided not to offer this option any more. This means that only GPL conformant open source projects are possible with unicap. I have not yet decided if I will offer a commercial license again sometime in the future.

unicap is now on Launchpad

I also created a project on Launchpad in the hope that this will speed up the development. Packages are now provided on my Launchpad PPA ( currently only for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic ). I also created a BZR branch on Launchpad which allows you to directly check out the development version of unicap.

You can now report bugs to the Bug Tracker or post feature request to the launchpad Blueprints page.

A Python extension to access video capture devices via unicap and to build applications with unicapgtk is now available!

Features

• access all video capture devices supported by unicap


• asynchronous and synchronous ( ie. callback driven ) video capture methods


• basic drawing and colorspace conversion functions for image buffers


• easy to use programming interface


• GTK+ widgets for video display, device properties and device property dialog


• GPL license

Installation

The easiest way to install the python extension modules on an Ubuntu Linux system is to install the pyunicap package from the package repository. Please note: If you previously used the package repository on Ubuntu and you are using Ubuntu 9.04, you need to update your installation source according to the instructions on the "using the package repository" page ( ie. you need to change the installation source to point to jaunty. Otherwise, the module will be installed for Python 2.5 while Ubuntu 9.04 uses Python 2.6.

For all other linux distributions, you can install the extensions from the source archive. The README file in the source archive contains some instruction on the installation procedure.

Usage

The source archive contains an example folder which should help you getting started. For console based applications, start with the GettingStarted/GettingStartedUnicap.py example and for GUI applications, use the GettingStarted/GettingStartedUnicapGtk.py example.

The unicap module has ( or should have ) docstrings for all methods and functions. Full documentation for the unicapgtk module is being worked on.

Download

The python extension is available in source form on the download page or in binary form for Ubuntu 8.04 and Ubuntu 9.04 from the package repository.

Feedback

Any feedback on the new Python extensions is greatly appreciated. For general comments and suggestions, please post a message in the General Discussion forum. For programming issues, please use the Programming forum.

Unicap 0.9.7 just got released!

Changes in the unicap release:

- fix the marshaller for the "unicapgtk_device_selection_changed" signal

This fix is required for the pyunicapgtk module for Python.

The source code for the new release is available here: http://unicap-imaging.org/download.htm. The unicap-imaging.org package repositories also contain the current release.

Unicap 0.9.6 and UCView 0.30 just got released!

Changes in the unicap release:

- fix a deadlock in the line drawing operation of libucil

- fix read current WB mode for TIS UVC Cameras

- minor fixes to v4l2 driver

- fix cropping for unicapgtk_videodisplay

- minor fixes to unicapgtk property dialog

Changes in the UCView release:

- code cleanup

- 'Change Device' dialog now non-modal, allowing on the fly video format changes

- cleaner plugin interface ( still needs some work )

- added 'device removed' info box

- detect when no more video frames are received


The source code for the new release is available here: http://unicap-imaging.org/download.htm. The unicap-imaging.org package repositories also contain the current release.

A new driver for The Imaging Source AUC/BUC CMOS cameras is finally available for BETA testing.

usbdevfs based driver

The AUC/BUC camera series are low cost USB cameras which due to hardware limitations are not capable of supporting the USB Video Class specification correctly. For this reason, the old solution to control the cameras via the uvcvideo driver did not work very well and needed to be replaced by a dedicated driver for the AUC/BUC cameras. This new driver is called euvccam_cpi and is now available via the download page.

The new driver uses usbdevfs to access the camera so no kernel mode driver is required for it to function.

New Licensing Policy

You will notice that the euvccam_cpi driver is released under a different license than the unicap library itself. The reason is that in the future I will differentiate more strictly between commercial and free users. More than once the GPL license of unicap gets ignored by commercial users and unicap is used in closed source environments without a proper license. But without funding from commercial licenses, further development of the unicap-imaging software is not feasible so a change in the license policy for the parts of the software that are expected to be mostly used in a commercial context was required.

The unicap library itself is still ( and will be in the future ) licensed under the GPL license ( or a commercial license for closed source contexts ).

Release Notes

The driver is in a BETA version, ie. it needs more testing and some features are still missing.

Software De-Bayering: Most AUC/BUC cameras only provide a RAW image from the colour sensors which means that the image needs to be processed by the software to produce a true RGB colour image. The driver offers a basic colour interpolation algorithm with white balancing to get a RGB image from the AUC/BUC cameras. Unfortunately the algorithm used requires a quite high amount of CPU performance as it is not yet very well optimized. This will change in one of the next versions.

I created a new forum for support questions regarding this driver. If you have any questions or issues with this driver, please feel free to post a message there.

Unicap 0.9.5 and UCView 0.23 just got released!

Changes in the unicap release:

- RAW AVI file recording fixes

- OGG/Theora file recording fixes


Changes in the UCView release:

- DBus support got removed as it was buggy and virtually unused

- Code cleanup small fixes


The source code for the new release is available here: http://unicap-imaging.org/download.htm. The unicap-imaging.org package repositories will be updated later this weekend.

Debian Packages

unicap library packages are now in Debian/testing. ucview packages are not yet available in the official Debian package repositories.

EDIT (05/21/09): The instructions here are obsolete. Click here for an update

The Imaging Source recently released a series of USB CMOS cameras. Unfortunately, these cameras are not fully USB Video Class compliant so that the cameras do not work correctly out of the box. The work on the unicap support for these cameras is still in progress but the software presented on this page should at least allow users to use the cameras in most applications.

Updating the Driver

As the camera is not fully UVC compliant, the uvcvideo driver to drive the cameras needs to be replaced with a patched one. The steps to update the driver are the same as in Installing USB Cameras but you need to use the following driver:

uvcvideo_r262_p1_euvccam.tgz

Updating unicap

I made an intermediate release of unicap which contains the changes required for the CMOS cameras. Currently, only the source code package is available:

unicap-0.9.4.tar.gz

Using uvcctls

The uvcctls tool is required to configure the driver. Without this tool, there is no control over the frame rate.

To use this tool, install and load the driver from above. With the camera connected, call the tool as follows ( as root! ):

python uvcctls.py tisEUVC.xml

There is currently one issue with this tool: It only works once after the driver is loaded. When the camera gets disconnected and reconnected, the driver needs to get unloaded and loaded and the uvcctls tool needs to be run again to get the frame rate control back.

uvcctls0.2.tgz


Color Interpolation

Most of the CMOS cameras do not do the RAW Bayer pattern interpolation. Instead the host computer needs to compute the color from the RAW pattern. To see a color image in UCView, you can use the following plugin:

ucview_debayer_plugin-0.1.tar.gz

To install the plugin, just configure it with the same prefix as you configured UCView ( or use /usr if you installed from a package ). Eg: configure --prefix=/usr. After installation, make sure the plugin is enabled in the 'Plugins' tab of the ucview preferences dialog. You will get a new entry in the 'Tools' menu to enable/disable the interpolation. You can configure the interpolation via the 'Configure Plugin' button in the preferences dialog.



The support for the TIS CMOS cameras should get better in the near future. Currently there is an alternative for the uvcvideo driver in heavy development which should fix most issues.

Unicap 0.9.3 and UCView 0.22 just got released!

Changes in the unicap release:

- optionally use libv4l to support more cameras

- fix installation directory of plugins for x64 systems

- fix scaling of ogg/theora video

- use categories for v4l2 properties


Changes in the UCView release:

- small changes to plugin api

- support video downscaling for ogg/theora videos

- russian translation


Important changes to the ubuntu package files:

The unicap packages got renamed to libunicap2, libunicapgtk2, libucil2 to match the debian package naming convention. It is recommended to uninstal the old packages named libunicap-2, libunicapgtk-2 and libucil-2.


The source code for the new release is available here: http://unicap-imaging.org/download.htm. The source code is available here: http://unicap-imaging.org/download.htm. Binary packages for Ubuntu 8.04 are available in the repositories ( using repositories ).

Unicap 0.9.2 just got released!

Changes in this release:

- Severall small bug fixes and improvements ( see ChangeLog )

- The EeePC packages got updated

The source code is available here: http://unicap-imaging.org/download.htm. Binary packages for Ubuntu 8.04 are available in the repositories ( using repositories ).

Unicap 0.9.1 just got released!

Changes in this release:

- An issue introduced with the last version causing a choppy video stream for certain video devices got fixed

- The video format resolution selection for PCI based frame grabbers got improved

The source code is available here: http://unicap-imaging.org/download.htm. Binary packages for Ubuntu 8.04 are available in the repositories ( using repositories ).

Unicap 0.9.0 just got released!

With this version, unicap is heading to a 1.0 stable release due in the next few weeks.

Changes in this release:

- Video downsize option for OGG/Theora videos

- Apple iSight cameras are now working again

- Fixes for the uncompressed AVI codec

- some other minor bug fixes


The source code is available here: http://unicap-imaging.org/download.htm. Binary packages for Ubuntu 8.04 are available in the repositories ( using repositories ).

Unicap version 0.2.24 and UCView version 0.21 just got released!

Changes in the unicap release:

- Support for upcoming The Imaging Source CMOS cameras

- video-4-linux-2 compatibility improvements

- fix for an issue that caused v4l2 capture to fail if start/stop was called repeatedly

- improved trigger support for IIDC/DCAM cameras

- code cleanup

- new audio/video codec API


Changes in the UCView release:

- Added a plugin to display a histogram

- switch to new unicap codec API

- fix for an issue that prevents the device to be restored correctly

- code cleanup



The source code is available here: http://unicap-imaging.org/download.htm

With this release, binary packages for Ubuntu 7.04 ( Feisty ) and Ubuntu 7.10 ( Gutsy ) will no longer be build. Ubuntu 8.04 LTS packages are available from the unicap repositories ( see: http://unicap-imaging.org/using_repositories.htm ).

On unicap-imaging.org you will find the unicap libaries and the ucview application as source packages from which you can compile and install on almost any Linux distribution. But normally you do not want to compile the library by yourself because if you do, the resulting files will not be under control of the package manager that your distribution usually uses to keep track of the installed software.

unicap-imaging.org therefore also hosts a repository containing the binary packages for the most popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu. Even though there are no packages for other linux distribution hosted on the unicap-imaging.org website itself, packages are often provided for other popular distributions by third party distributors. I will explain how to install and use unicap on some other distributions in a series of blog posts. Today I will start with Fedora 9.

unciap and ucview packages are already available in the default repositories of Fedora thanks to the work of Robert Scheck who builds and maintains the rpm packages. To install unicap on CentOS or Red Hat Enterpris Linux 5 you need to use EPEL ( Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux ). Please follow this link to learn how to set up EPEL: Fedora Wiki

The most basic case is to install only the libraries and UCView. This can be done by the following command, executed as the root user:


yum install unicap ucview


If you want to compile the examples that come with unicap, you need to install some more packages to be able to compile them:


yum install gcc make gtk2-devel libtheora-devel libvorbis-devel unicap unicap-devel


Afterwards you should be able to compile and run the basic device-info example which just prints information about all supported devices. Many other examples require additional dependencies, for instance the OpenCV example needs opencv, obviously. You should be able to locate the required packages with yum search in most cases ( otherwise, post a comment here ). Please let me know if you face any issue in using unicap on Fedora / RedHat systems.

Among others, The Imaging Source cameras can be externally triggered and have digital in- and outputs to control external devices. In a series of blog postings on their machine vision blog, The Imaging Source gives some details about the hardware and explains how to build an external trigger circuit:

Trigger Hardware and Timing
Pin Header Layout
Hirose Connector Layout

Software support for this functionality is present in unicap.

In the first post in this series, I created an example that draws a
crosshair on the video image and a frame counter.

In this post, I will extend the example to write the video stream to
an OGG/THEORA video file.
Continue reading "Basic Image Manipulation ... »