Hi everyone, I am glad to announce the birth of the Movid project: movid.org

Movid is an acronym; it stands for ‘Modular Open Vision Interaction Daemon’. It’s a cross-platform and Open Source vision tracker, designed to be as modular as possible. Although the project is pretty young, it already features more than 20 modules, including blob and fiducial trackers as well as TUIO output. Movid is coded in C++, and use WOscLIB, cJSON, libevent, libfidtrack, jpeg-8 and XgetOpt.

Movid has several key characteristics:

  • Cross-platform: It works under Windows, Linux and MacOSX.
  • Daemon: You can run the program without a GUI and control it from another computer over the network.
  • Threading: Each module can be run inside a thread. This means that you can finally fully utilize your multi-core processor!
  • Remote API: The daemon can be controlled with a JSON API. This also means that you can write your own GUI, e.g. in Flash, and the daemon can be controlled from any application that can make http requests!
  • Full HTML5 embedded administration: By default, the daemon acts as a HTTP server. You can control and modify the tracking pipeline in real-time and adjust many parameters.
  • Image streaming: Most modules process images. For your application or GUI, you can get the output image via a stream. So your applications can show any image from the piepline or use it for advanced features
  • Flexible pipeline: Unlike other applications, Movid allows you to fine-tune your image processing pipeline if you are an expert. You can create new pipelines, add modules/filters and change their parameters in real time.

However, Movid is not ready for users yet, since we are missing a few modules, like calibration. Right now, we are searching developers to support us with the further development.

More info:

7 comments Apr 19, 2010 10:31:00 PM hci, movid, multi-touch, nerdstuff, opensource, planet-pymt, planet-ubuntu, technology, vision

Comment by Flimm — Apr 19, 2010 11:16:42 PM | #- re

Exciting stuff! I might finally get round to making that <a href=”www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQpr3W-YmcQ“>home-made multitouch touchpad</a>. Last time I tried I couldn’t get the tracking software to work. BTW, the <a href=”movid.org/Documentation/BuildingSourceCode“>documentation on building the project</a> has a broken link for Linux builds.

Comment by Marco Diego Aurélio Mesquita — Apr 19, 2010 11:31:33 PM | #- re

Great! It is good to know that Ramenhdr[0] will now have some competition!

[0] ramenhdr.sourceforge.net/

Comment by Elias — Apr 19, 2010 11:41:17 PM | #- re

Very interesting. Since I can feel this project is network- and multithreading-oriented, do you think LAN clustering will be implemented at some point? Many thanks and keep up the good work!

Comment by dennda — Apr 20, 2010 12:51:16 AM | #- re

Flimm, thanks for pointing that out. We will fix it soonish (as soon as somebody wrote the docs).

Elias, maybe at one point, but not in the near future (except you want to do it and let us merge it).

Comment by Mark — Apr 20, 2010 12:53:02 AM | #- re

Looks very cool. Probably useful to indicate in the synopsis that this is a computer vision project for tracking objects in video data (as opposed to a project like Tracker or Zeitgeist or Strigi for tracking filesystem data, or a project like Ardour for manipulating audio tracks).

Comment by crazylinuxuser — Apr 20, 2010 2:08:18 AM | #- re

Look like Harpia but with much more advanced feature

Comment by mara — Apr 20, 2010 8:43:38 PM | #- re

It doesn’t work for me without setting mo_baseurl = ‘http://localhost:7500′ in movid.js . 127.0.0.1 bad. It’s probably specific to my proxy settings.