[R] Video Analysis?

[Kevin Middleton]

On Sep 5, 2009, at 5:07 PM, spencerg wrote:

>     What software exists for digitizing video to quantify the motion  
> of specific features in the image?  I might be willing to use  
> something that's NOT in R, though I'd prefer something in R (or at  
> least with an R intereface).

A few options that I can think of (2 non-R, 1 R):

- If you have access to Matlab, Ty Hedrick (UNC Chapel Hill) has a  
good digitizing program that can handle 3d digitizing with DLT (but  
works fine for 2D), automatic point tracking, reads/writes csv.

	http://www.unc.edu/~thedrick/software1.html

- James Rholf's tpsDig (Windows only; http://life.bio.sunysb.edu/ee/rohlf/software.html 
) can be used as a general point digitizer. I think you would have to  
save the videos as image sequences first and reformat the data after.  
I haven't tried this, but I think it would work.

- For one-off, small digitizing projects in R, I have exported videos  
to jpg sequences, loaded them with read.jpeg(), and used locator() for  
digitizing. Negatives: (1) lack of flexibility, (2) very hard to go  
back and fix mistakes, (3) plotting jpeg images is slow unless the  
image dimensions are reduced. But it's a native R solution.

Kevin

-------------------------------------------------
Kevin M. Middleton
Department of Biology
California State University San Bernardino