Video Processing and Enthought Python

Blog post edited by Anonymous - "Migrated to Confluence 4.0"

One of the reasons for choosing to work with the Enthought version of Python is that future users of software that we develop do not need to download and figure out how to install all of the different Python modules that they may need to work with. This is particularly important to me because I want to distribute our code to researchers that may not have expertise using Python. I was particularly excited to learn that the Enthought distribution of Python came with the scikits-image module and the Python Image Library (PIL) . Initially, I hoped that these packages would contain everything I need right out of the box.

Unfortunately, I just learned that Enthought Python is missing some libraries that are essential to my research. In particular, scikits-image works with the OpenCV library but does not actually require OpenCV, and OpenCV is not included in the Enthought install. Part of my goal for this summer is to extend the functionality of the ChamView software which is written in Python and requires OpenCV to read and write to video files. This limitation is frustrating because video is particular important and can be difficult to work with. I also remember that there were different procedures for installing OpenCV on different OS platforms.

Since OpenCV is not available by default in the Enthought installation, I did some quick web searching to see if I could find any alternatives. So far I have come up with the following possibilities:

• pyffmpeg http://code.google.com/p/pyffmpeg/.
• PyMedia http://pymedia.org/tut/
• VTK http://www.vtk.org/
• pyglet http://www.pyglet.org/

Unfortunately, these first two options are also not installed by default in the Enthought distribution , so they are no better than OpenCV. VTK and pyglet are installed but I am having trouble finding documentation and getting an example to work. It may be that my best bet is to install OpenCV. I will probably need to logically separate my code so as to isolate functions that require OpenCV, in case it is not available when users are installing and using our software elsewhere.

• Dirk

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