There is ovbious need in integrating video support into EMC [emc]. From simple live video window for manual adjusting to full fledged CV implementations for computer aided marker tracking.

First attemtps were documented on EMC forum [emc-forum-video]. Propoused solution was to patch gqcam, very simple V4L application. While this solution is very simple it’s hard to add CV algorithms into it. So after some investigations on the topic choices were limited to two frameworks: GStreamer and CamUnits [camunits]. Second framework looks more reasonable for this task since it was created for CV tasks and has very clean codebase. It’s main concept is Unit — stream processing unit which may perform some image conversion.

After choosing CamUnits as base framework there was some work going into patching camview tool from it to allow embedding in Axis window via XEmbed protocol. But soon it comes obvious that using stock camview is not wise for EMC for several reasons:

For camview clone hard way was choosen — create python bidings [pycamunits] and then write simple python script. Since CamUnits is GLib based and GUI part is using Gtk it was not that hard. But after creating python bindings simple camview replacement (without manager/control widgets) may be written in ~30 lines of code!.

There are several plugins shipping along with camview-emc. Here is list of plugins packaged into camunits-plugins-emc-misc:

Additional plugins that may be useful but not packaged yet: