Open Telecine, OpenCV, image processing

This is the first post about an attempt to make an open source telecine. Telecine is the process of transferring motion picture film into video form. The preliminary goal of this project is currently limited to converting 8mm film to DVD using a digital camera, while levering other open source projects. Telecine has had much success in using flatbed scanners and ones that record from modifyed film projectors. The frame-by-frame projector use by this project will be built from scratch, by using: two stepper motors, an arduino board, an EasyDriver (from SparkFun), a MakerBot for printing 3D components, a LEDs, and optics. The software to convert the images into a movie is yet to be determined, but here is the first attempt.

The first set of images are a mockup of frames being capture and processed to determined the film spool holes. The 8mm spool holes need to be determined in order to perform cropping correctly, and to uniquely identify each frame. The green squares were automatically identified by image processing. An example (e.g. squares.cpp) contained within OpenCV was modified to enhance the discovery of rectangles with greater accuracy. The image processing is as follows: pyramid scaling (for smoothing imaging and filtering out some noise), Canny algorithm (for edge detection), initial contours detection, Douglas-Peucker algorithm (for reducing the number of points in a curve), and finally rectangle detection (for eliminating other types of polygons). The next task is to add code that will only detect rectangles with the correct proportions for a 8mm spool hole.

The second set of images are from Flatbed Scanner Digital Telecine (FSDT) to give a more realistic test. Notice that the image processing failed to detect one of the spool hole. Near perfection is paramount, because of the number of frames contained on large spools of film.

The project currently uses Ubuntu 11.04 (simular to Microsoft Windows), OpenCV, GNU gcc, and Eclipse. The photo of the pottery vase was taken with an Sprint HTC Evo (simular to iPhone).