OpenCV Library for Processing

Did you ever ask yourself how to play around with your webcam ?

Two years ago I started a small project to track a certain color range within the frames grabbed from my webcam using real-time image processing. So I came across the Open Computer Vision Library for C/C++, in short OpenCV, developed by Intel and published under a BSD License. As an example : The built-in facetracking algorithms are definitly the favorite toys of our Federal Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble.

I had a hard time of compiling the sources on my Mac but at least I managed it. Nowadays precompiled builds are available. I was very impressed by the power of this library, even by the simple example programs preinstalled. After another while to understand the principle used by OpenCV I finally managed to achieve my goals with it.

Alternatively to code OpenCV in C/C++ Python language wrapping is supported and some other guys finally got the idea to write an OpenCV wrapper for Java to create bindings form Processing to OpenCV. Also, they´ve written some examples to use OpenCV with Processing.

But note, this project is in a early beta statium (0.1) and currently they just ported some basic functionalites. And to perform real-time image processing on a system written in Java is as clever as to start undoped at the Tour de France. But the main idea of processing is still prototyping, isn´t it ?

So, just sketch some HCI interfaces.

P.S.: If someone owns a Mac and could do me the favor : I´ve trouble with the built-in OpenCV Python wrapper. Would be kind if you can report me if it´s working out of the box by compiling one of the Python example modules which should be found in the folder /opt/local/share/opencv/samples/python. Thanks in advance !