About ROV Frame Grabbed Images

Some recent history

In the beginning there was no facility for routine digital image frame capture on ROV expeditions. With the 1996-1997 VIMS/Vicki project came the purchase of SGI workstations capable of real-time digital image capture and processing. At first we simply plugged the camera feed into the system and used the system tool CosmoCapture to grab images and save them to disk. A script was written to transfer these images to another SGI system in the digital video lab where they could then be viewed from internal web pages. The script converted the original SGI RGB images (about 1 MB each) to 100% quality JPEG images (about 300 KB each) and removed the originals. The 100% JPEG images could be viewed in Netscape, yet preserved most of the detail within the image. This system was in place from about October 1996 to the summer of 1997.

We learned much from using this system, and the ease of retrieving the images was appreciated. There were several deficiencies with this system, namely:

  1. There is no confirmation that images are actually being saved to disk
  2. No ancillary information is saved with the images
  3. Naming of files is error-prone
  4. Image files are not organized in much of any fashion making their administration difficult
  5. Difficult to capture other video sources, such as from the sonar or sit cam

Starting around July 1997 we integrated the digital image frame capture system with the VIMS/Vicki software.  The advantages of this are as follows:

  1. The above inadequacies in the initial system are addressed
  2. The fact that an image has be snapped can  be entered into the VIMS database
  3. Smaller (about 50 KB) 75% quality JPEG preview images with overlain text are created
  4. The original SGI RGB images are compressed and saved, these can be easily converted to other formats for import to other programs with no loss of detail.
  5. Annotation text appears on the image, which may encourage real-time use of the system for annotating video
  6. Tape timecode is now saved with each image to aid in finding events on the tapes
  7. The web interface to the images was improved

What follows are details on the installation of the system on both vessels and links to the source code. This web page is not meant to be an instruction manual for how to use the VIMS/Vicki system, for more details on how one should use it, please see the Sample Collection web page or the ....

 

Ventana image grabbing system

Please see this document  pdficonsmall.gif (153 bytes) Installation of Vicki and image capture on the Pt. Lobos

The images are saved on host algae in directory /video2/Ventana/stills. There are subdirectories for the years and year-days for each exedition. This directory is mapped to the CanyonHead web server as http://mww.mbari.org/Ventana.

 

Tiburon image grabbing system

Please see this document  pdficonsmall.gif (153 bytes)  Installation of Vicki and image capture on the Western Flyer

The images are saved on host algae in directory /video2/Tiburon/stills. There are subdirectories for the years and year-days for each exedition. This directory is mapped to the CanyonHead web server as http://mww.mbari.org/Tiburon.

 

The software

For ease of implementation existing packages were used to the greatest extent feasible. The major tools used include SmallTalk for the Vicki program, Perl for the vfcd and vifd daemons and the vfc2web script, ImageMagick for the image processing, cgi-bin scripts and web pages for the user access. Here are the development locations of the source code for the major components (please refer to the above documents for details on how these fit together).

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Last updated: 3 March 1998, Mike McCann