metgrab: Image Processing on video streams

I got a toy, a video capture card called a Matrox Meteor. In 1996, this was a totally bitchin' video capture card! I was starting to mess around with it programatically and the only reasonable UNIX driver for it was in FreeBSD. The existing softare that it worked with was mostly for video confernecing. Pretty boring over the slow links everyone seemed to have back then. So at first, I just decided to get familiar with the driver API and write a simple app to display the images into an X11 window. As I got that working, I decided to screw around with image processing and just overall neat effects on the live video feed.

All these pics were grabbed with different versions of my grabber, with different effects, some were planned, others are bugs. Now, its pretty easy to see these effects on other still pictures, but doing them realtime on video is amazing. The edge detection pictures looks decent, and you can pull off the same stuff Photoshop, but when you walk around the your house with the video camera and then play it back through the edge detection filter, the world turns into a giant animated sketch.. its one fo the neatest things I've ever seen animated. Skin tones and wrinkles come to life, even though everything looks sketched.

Update: I've rewritten this app to be more useful for modern systems.



Sample pictures, with filters applied

I was on phone when I took these pics, thats the explaination of the phone in a lot of pics.

A few of my montiors. (if you look carefully, you can see the same picture in a window on the monitor on the left.. feedback!)

My kitty and me... this style looks sooo unreal when animated in realtime video.

I dislike this effect a lot, embossing is ugly, the world was not meant to look carved.

Classic picture. ;-)

Buggy effect.

My kitty likes to peek in my mouth a lot.

Normal pictures of my kitty.


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