Hello,
I've been thinking
for a while about installing a stereo webcam on my roof (my flat is located on
the last floor) that could be viewed on my website.
I have two low cost
webcams bought in a supermarket for 12 each. The resolution is VGA but the
picture quality is a similar to the price, pretty low as well: limited dynamic,
blurred corners,...
I've made some tests
from my window sill but I'm planning to install them on a higher place, on some
unused chimneys, Montmartre should then be visible on the left of the images. Of
course for placing them outdoor I have to made them water-proof, I've now
completed this but not yet tested under a heavy rain!
The stereo base is
about 28 cm.
I'm using an old
laptop with a home-made software that is doing picture acquisition every minute,
align them (with fixed x and y values), combine the two views in a side-by-side
picture and save the result on my web-server.
You can see the
results here:
The Java applet
allows to view in parallel, crossed-eye and different anaglyph
types.
On the web server
I'm keeping the last 1440 pictures (24*60) that can be viewed using the two
sliders and "Show" button.
I'm also planning to
build each day at midnight the video of the previous day (I'm using "AutoIt", an
amazing freeware for automating tasks).
You can look at some
previous videos (red-cyan anaglyph and crossed-eye only) for the following
dates: 18,
20, 25 and 26 August 2007
Note: the are in Flash 8 format
compressed with the VP62 codec which seems to yield better results but still
shows compression ghosts for anaglyphs.
BTW, Adobe has
announced that the next version of Flash will be using the H.264 video
compression and H.264 can (theoretically) be set to use 4:4:4 (no chroma
subsampling) and would give better anaglyph videos.
Enjoy!
Pierre
Meindre.
