AnTS 4 Windows is here!!
This last month has been extremely productive. All the preparatory work for the 2012 Telluride Neuromorphic Cognition Workshop - I'll post something about it in the following days - and the realization of the "social neuroscience and robotic pet project" has resulted in a huge push in many aspects. One of those aspects is that we had to have our technology ready for a real battle. Here I mean for battle being at 9000 feet in a tiny town with no access to a computer store, intermittent and slow Internet connection, undetermined number of untrained students to use our software, unknown number of computer architectures and operating systems, etc. These unknowns pushed me to work on a port of AnTS - Analysis and Tracking System - for windows. Read this post for information on what AnTS is and what you can do with it.
The main reason to port AnTS is a very practical one. Whereas RPM packages are widely used to distribute software packages under some linux distributions, today distributions based on debian - that use a different packaging system - are very popular. In addition, different kernel, different OpenCV libraries, etc make it difficult to have a universal linux solution. In fact, the AnTS live image available that boots an OpenSUSE distribution is a neat solution, but only really usable if tracking with AnTS is the one single purpose of your machine. The AnTS live will boot your machine into a completely naked linux distribution with only AnTS and a couple of other necessary basic tools. Instead, a proper windows binary of AnTS should be able to run - cross fingers - on any windows machine, and largely independent of the architecture and version of the operating system (windows XP and above). On top of that, for good or bad, Microsoft still dominates a huge segment of the OS market.
Given all the above considerations, I have invested some time in bumping my head against MS Visual Studio, and given that both OpenCV and QT - the main libraries used by AnTS - are muliplatform, the first "working" windows port of AnTS was produced after a couple of days. This version is extremely recent and it is VERY unstable. However, it is mostly functional but you should expect few crashes from time to time. It is provided as a first port of the linux version to windows, what is a major achievement already. I'll be working on fixing and upgrading it so it is at least as usable as the linux version.
What it does:
- It supports PlayStation Eye cameras and video for windows compatible cameras.
- All functionalities for tracking (all filters and color tracking) seem to work.
- Perspective correction is also working. However, not the distortion correction.
- Tracking information is sent over UDP sockets using the protocol defined in the GUI by the user.
Known limitations:
- Recent windows versions (windows 7 and above) dropped support for video for windows. Only PlayStation Eye cameras will work.
- For some reason some cameras will deliver an inverted image. An inversion image transformation file is provided so that in the default configuration you can select - unselect the use of it in the perspective correction configuration section.
- The pdf of the manual does not launch. It is for the moment provided in the downloads section.
- Some of the menus/configuration boxes are still labeled as a linux system (video source index as /dev/videoX) and few functionalities are not working yet under windows (use of video file as input)
- Expect some random crashes when setting inappropriate parameters for the tracking filters...
Downloads:
I have decided to move all AnTS files out of the blog posts and dedicate a single page to it. Since it seems that I may be working on it more than I thought, this will make it definitely easier to post new AnTS versions than modifying old blog posts.
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