Thomas Kuleßa

augenblick

2001-2005. software to track movement in video. with Matthias Weber.

augenblick is a object video tracking software. It was developed from 2000-2001 for GMD, German Research Center for Information Technology, St. Augustin and Academy of Media Arts, Cologne.

It is capable of tracking the positions of several objects (usually human bodies). This is achieved by doing a simple, but robust image segmentation by grey scale threshold comparison or by comparing the images of the video stream to a static base image of the observed scene. After doing a blob analysis on each binarised image it applies the Hungarian method for mapping the blobs in the current frame to the ones in its predecessor. Access to the collected data is given through a custom multicast based protocol, or the UDP based OSC protocol. It is implemented on GNU/Linux and works with low cost analogue TV PCI cards.

Its primary target of application is the use audio-video based interactive installations. As this it was successfully used in various installations on diverse media art exhibitions and festivals. Some of these are:

If you want to know more about the software, feel free to contact me.