webcam zoomer and area locator

[tester]

This little fellow should work with webcam (tested on picture, no webcam here), adding two cool features: zooming the picture and selecting the area you wish to see. Potential uses: eye movement registering, mouth positions registering, and so on. It's better than automatic tracking in situations, where position of tracked element is rather fixed per session.

Did anyone played with auto tracking of various elements, and following them automatically? Whole face is too big to be point of interest...

Any interesting databases of Haar tables? (have no idea how it works).

[KG_is_back]

Very nice!!! I didn't noticed how ugly I look when zoomed close xD

[tester]

Hehe, if it looks so bad, maybe you should upgrade your webcam.

I'm thinking to integrate motion/zoom zones within it, to reduce amount of visual elements. I think that:

1) click and drag - could zoom out 1:1 the picture and draw a small rectangle on a zoomed zone
2) the rectangle would be then moved around, to point the location to show (undrag would bring the zoomed place)
3) right click and drag (up/down) could be responsible for zoom in/out
4) right dbclick could zoom out 1:1 the picture

Second scenario would be to keep the zoom slider, and use right click to activate/deactivate motion mode. Thus - the zoomed rectangle would stay on track, and not follow the mouse automatically. Anyway - things to consider.

And now the mad science: there are few bitmap primitives that could do interesting stuff with the picture itself.

ColourDetect, MotionDetect, VideoSave (supports codecs! why can't this support be done for audio codecs as well?) and few others.

[tester]

Here are two possible scenarios.

Now - I doubt that it's worth to use a self-scaled small rectangle, that reflects zoom factor, because at higher zooms and small webcam window sizes at all - it woult be not usable. I think it is better to use pointer, to select the center of your interest (camtasia style).

[tester]

Hmm... And how to save to a file not the whole bitmap/picture, but only the cropped area that is displayed?

//edit:

Okay, found it. I have vague idea how exactly this works, but it works.