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Avisynth and ImageJ

Posted by Holger Goerlitz on Dec 11, 2008; 3:05pm
URL: http://imagej.273.s1.nabble.com/Avisynth-and-ImageJ-tp3694276.html

Hi all,

I am establishing a 3D animal tracking project using video recordings in
mpg2 formate. mpg2 streams seem to be tricky, but I have to use them...
For this project, the position of the animals should be tracked by a
user from frame to frame. Several tracking plugins exist for ImageJ; I
was using MTrackJ for images so far. However, now I would like to be
able to track the position not on subsequent images, but I would like to
use directly the video-files.

ImageJ allows to open avi-files via AVI Reader plugin, but not
mpg2-files. However, there exists a very powerful video-editing software
called Avisynth which can read a variety of video-files, process and
edit them, and serve them to any other program, e.g. your favourite
media player. Effectively, what you do is to open an Avisynth file
(*.avs) in your media player. This *.avs-file only contains a few very
simple lines of code containing the video-file name and all relevant
video editing steps (e.g. deinterlacing, bobbing, cropping,
contrast-adjustment,...). When opening this *.avs-file, Avisynth will in
real-time process the video-stream and serve the video frame by frame to
your media player, displaying you the processed video. The big advantage
is that you can write one *.avs-file and easily edit each video, while
watching or analysing them, without the need to do this manually for
every single video.

I was wondering whether anybody knows of plugins for ImageJ that allow
to open such *.avs-files of Avisynth. Effectively, this would give
ImageJ the capability to process all types of video-files that can be
read by Avisynth, including all editing capability of Avisynth
(difference frames, colour -, contrast -, luminance adjustment,... -
simply everything Avisynth can do). I think that this would be an
incredibly powerful tool for ImageJ, but I haven't found anything about
it anywhere.

I would be most grateful for any ideas, suggestions and help.

I have never ever written any plugins for ImageJ (and don't yet know how
to do it), but was wondering it it would be worth doing that?

Best,
Holger



--
Dr. Holger R. Goerlitz

School of Biological Sciences
University of Bristol
Woodland Road
Bristol BS8 1UG
UK

phone: +44 (0)117 95 45909
fax: +44 (0)117 33 17985
[hidden email]