Analysis and Tracking System (AnTS) goes Kinect and Qt4 !!

I'm still using some of the momentum left from the Telluride workshop, and it seems that AnTS is finally getting up to date! After some time thinking about doing things, finally I found time for doing some of them. One of them was, of course, polishing the Windows port of AnTS.  There are still many things to improve with AnTS4Win, but we are getting there.

The effort porting our camera based tracking system seems to start to pay off. In this case there are two major improvements, Qt4 and Kinect. One of the reasons to port AnTS to windows was stability, and increased compatibility. It seems we are definitely getting both. Now AnTS comes as an installable of about 10 Mb, that works in all Windows versions that I could test it on, from XP 32bits to W7 64bits. The camera compatibility has been increased, supporting a wide range of cameras, including the software ManyCam (http://www.manycam.com/). This software allows you to use your webcam with multiple applications at the same time; screencast your desktop as a webcam; manipulate the camera image; add video effects; play a video file; etc. A very interesting discovery. Basically, through this software all video devices can be made compatible with AnTS.

From Canada, my friend Ulysses has taken my code and performed a major upgrade, which is moving from Qt3 to Qt4. Whereas using Qt3 in Windows is not a major issue (because windows dll's may last forever), it is becoming problematic under Linux. Qt3 is deprecated and it is to be expected that in the near future it may not come with the major Linux distributions. For the moment there will coexist 2 branches of AnTS 2.x (Qt3, Linux and Windows) and 3.x (Qt4, Windows only), until the Qt4 version is 100% working under Linux. Then I will attempt merging them. In addition to that, we have moved to OpenCV 2.4, the latest version of OpenCV.

On this side of the Atlantic I spent quite some time cleaning up issues and working to support the MS Kinect as one of the input devices. After a full day of work I am pleased to say that the Kinect is now fully integrated with AnTS (for Windows) using the NUI driver from Code Labs. You can use it as a normal webcam or use the depth image (color coded or grayscale proportional to distance).

You can download the new AnTS 2.7 (Qt3 + kinect) for Linux and Windows, and AnTS 3.0 (Qt4) here: http://sergibermudez.blogspot.com/p/ants-downloads.html