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Pip3 install videoflow – new Python library to do computer vision on video

151 points by jadielam 7y ago

Waterluvian 7y ago
I kinda like that the title is basically a call to action button in the form of how to get the product.
m0zg 7y ago
I've implemented something similar with Gstreamer for my own work. Gstreamer has some of the most disorganized documentation known to man, though, and if something doesn't work, you have to do elaborate googling first to figure out what's wrong (error messages aren't generally helpful) and then experiment with how to fix it. There are also 2 distinct incompatible versions of it in the wild: 0.10 and 1.0. Needless to say, I strongly suspect very few researchers have enough dev chops to meaningfully use Gstreamer. When it does work, though, it's pretty great, and it offers reasonable integration with GTK and can be made to work with Cairo. I got it to the point where it works for what I need to do, but I wouldn't want to release the code on GitHub because it's relatively high maintenance. Interestingly I ended up with a similar layout: a set of frame producers (video file, webcam, sequence of jpegs), 2 video sinks (gtk and mp4), and the code to draw stuff in between (using PyCairo for vector and PIL for raster).
- jadielam 7y ago
  I am glad to receive some validation on my approach. The way you did and the way I am doing it seems very natural to me. I explored the gstreamer way at the beginning, but thought that I wanted to build something that would work out of the bat.
- jadielam 7y ago
  I think you should release the code. It might be helpful in its own ways.
  - namibj 7y ago
    I hate how publishing on github makes people assume they have _any_ obligations to/for it. Just make an issue with the title "Use it as YOU see fit; I don't maintain this; if you pay I will probably look at your request" (the last is optional) . The sheer existence of this helps. You don't pay for hosting.
- abledon 7y ago
  Wow if you figured out how to get gstreamer working -congrats . I’d love a gist in python explaining how to set it up —- the docs are so hard to understand
cheez 7y ago
I don't know about you guys, but I find it really cool that pre-trained models will be part of open source software from now on.
- antpls 7y ago
  Definitely. Last weekend, I had a simple project of locking my computer screen when I am away with the help of the webcam. I know this is trivial with current state-of-the-art pretrained neural net models, but I did give up. I couldnt find an easy way to fetch pretrained models (from where? which one?), feed the webcam stream, and then do inference "is there a face in the image?". It would probably be trivial for someone who knows CV libraries or tensorflow, but we really miss the good old time when 5 obvious lines of Python did the job. Maybe a new Python standard library with an API for AI would be useful here.
  - _visgean 7y ago
    try yolo.
  - milquetoastaf 7y ago
    No need for ML https://docs.opencv.org/3.4/db/d5c/tutorial_py_bg_subtraction.html https://docs.opencv.org/3.4/db/d5c/tutorial_py_bg_subtractio... https://realpython.com/face-recognition-with-python/#opencv https://realpython.com/face-recognition-with-python/#opencv
  - cheez 7y ago
    I think you're onto something. A "pip install" for models. Perhaps "pip install" is sufficient and we just need to start using it.
    - antpls 7y ago
      Back in the days, when I started Python, I didn't use external libraries. It was all the included batteries and docs, and it was great to start. I was thinking about a new high-level module in the standard, you would just (pseudo python code) : import ai.vision guesses = ai.vision.guess(open('myimage.png')) print(guesses) # ["cat","person","boat"] Three lines, everything else is abstracted. You would have ai.vision and ai.text for a start, with some accessors to other state-of-the-art models (like ai.vision.imagenet if you know better what your are doing) The underlying models would be shipped and updated with newer versions of Python.
jadielam 7y ago
The repo is trending on Github today: https://github.com/trending/python?since=daily https://github.com/trending/python?since=daily
TaylorAlexander 7y ago
Hey looks promising! I’m slowly adding vision to my robot project, and I’ve got a couple of stereo cameras I need to process.
MauiWarrior 7y ago
How is it different from CV2?
xparco 7y ago
How is this compared to opencv/simplecv?

151 points by jadielam 7y ago

I kinda like that the title is basically a call to action button in the form of how to get the product.

m0zg 7y ago

I've implemented something similar with Gstreamer for my own work. Gstreamer has some of the most disorganized documentation known to man, though, and if something doesn't work, you have to do elaborate googling first to figure out what's wrong (error messages aren't generally helpful) and then experiment with how to fix it. There are also 2 distinct incompatible versions of it in the wild: 0.10 and 1.0. Needless to say, I strongly suspect very few researchers have enough dev chops to meaningfully use Gstreamer. When it does work, though, it's pretty great, and it offers reasonable integration with GTK and can be made to work with Cairo. I got it to the point where it works for what I need to do, but I wouldn't want to release the code on GitHub because it's relatively high maintenance. Interestingly I ended up with a similar layout: a set of frame producers (video file, webcam, sequence of jpegs), 2 video sinks (gtk and mp4), and the code to draw stuff in between (using PyCairo for vector and PIL for raster).

jadielam 7y ago
I am glad to receive some validation on my approach. The way you did and the way I am doing it seems very natural to me. I explored the gstreamer way at the beginning, but thought that I wanted to build something that would work out of the bat.
jadielam 7y ago
I think you should release the code. It might be helpful in its own ways.
- namibj 7y ago
  I hate how publishing on github makes people assume they have _any_ obligations to/for it. Just make an issue with the title "Use it as YOU see fit; I don't maintain this; if you pay I will probably look at your request" (the last is optional) . The sheer existence of this helps. You don't pay for hosting.
abledon 7y ago
Wow if you figured out how to get gstreamer working -congrats . I’d love a gist in python explaining how to set it up —- the docs are so hard to understand

cheez 7y ago

I don't know about you guys, but I find it really cool that pre-trained models will be part of open source software from now on.

antpls 7y ago
Definitely. Last weekend, I had a simple project of locking my computer screen when I am away with the help of the webcam. I know this is trivial with current state-of-the-art pretrained neural net models, but I did give up. I couldnt find an easy way to fetch pretrained models (from where? which one?), feed the webcam stream, and then do inference "is there a face in the image?". It would probably be trivial for someone who knows CV libraries or tensorflow, but we really miss the good old time when 5 obvious lines of Python did the job. Maybe a new Python standard library with an API for AI would be useful here.
- _visgean 7y ago
  try yolo.
- milquetoastaf 7y ago
  No need for ML https://docs.opencv.org/3.4/db/d5c/tutorial_py_bg_subtraction.html https://docs.opencv.org/3.4/db/d5c/tutorial_py_bg_subtractio... https://realpython.com/face-recognition-with-python/#opencv https://realpython.com/face-recognition-with-python/#opencv
- cheez 7y ago
  I think you're onto something. A "pip install" for models. Perhaps "pip install" is sufficient and we just need to start using it.
  - antpls 7y ago
    Back in the days, when I started Python, I didn't use external libraries. It was all the included batteries and docs, and it was great to start. I was thinking about a new high-level module in the standard, you would just (pseudo python code) : import ai.vision guesses = ai.vision.guess(open('myimage.png')) print(guesses) # ["cat","person","boat"] Three lines, everything else is abstracted. You would have ai.vision and ai.text for a start, with some accessors to other state-of-the-art models (like ai.vision.imagenet if you know better what your are doing) The underlying models would be shipped and updated with newer versions of Python.

jadielam 7y ago

The repo is trending on Github today: https://github.com/trending/python?since=daily https://github.com/trending/python?since=daily

TaylorAlexander 7y ago

Hey looks promising! I’m slowly adding vision to my robot project, and I’ve got a couple of stereo cameras I need to process.

MauiWarrior 7y ago

How is it different from CV2?

xparco 7y ago

How is this compared to opencv/simplecv?