Don Havey

Alright I’m back. Still got a couple of other projects going on that are sucking me away from the tutorials, but I figured that I should get at least one tutorial up this week to let everyone know that I’m still alive. As I mentioned, I’m going to dive into the topics of video capture and computer vision in Processing.

Today I’ll present three variations on a theme (it’s like This American Life!). Today’s theme: Mapping video on to irregular polygons. Or, as I like to put it, cutting out pieces of video as if you’re using scissors and paper.

Since these applets will all require a webcam, I’m not going to post them inline on the page. I’ll scatter some images about the page and point you towards the required classes (they’re after the jump today).

You’ll have to paste the thing into Processing to see live results. Note that you may need to configure the line that finds your webcam, although this should work for most situations:

//initialize camera
String[] cams = Capture.list();
println(cams);
//you may need to change which camera in the list it chooses below
cam2 = new Capture(this,w/2,h/2,cams[0],fr);

What you’ll learn

• Filling a polygon with an image instead of a color.
• Drawing polygons and removing them with a right-click.
• Using an image’s pixels[] array.
• A few other tips and tricks to working with video capture in Processing… like using two video streams simultaneously.

Ready?

Read more…