How to draw an unfilled square on top of a stream video using a mouse and track the object enclosed in the square automatically in C# ?

Question

Hi,

I am making an object tracking application. I have used Emgucv 2.1.0.0 to load a video file to a picturebox. I have also taken the video stream from a web camera.

Now, I want to draw an unfilled square on the video stream using a mouse and then track the object enclosed by the unfilled square as the video continues to stream.

This is what people have suggested so far:-

(1) .NET Video overlay drawing(DirectX) - but this is for C++ users, the suggester said that there are .NET wrappers, but I had a hard time finding any.

(2) DxLogo sample
DxLogo – A sample application showing how to superimpose a logo on a data stream. It uses a capture device for the video source, and outputs the result to a file. Sadly, this does not use a mouse.

(3) GDI+ and mouse handling - this area I do not have a clue.

And for tracking the object in the square, I would appreciate if someone give me some research paper links to read.

Any help as to using the mouse to draw on a video is greatly appreciated. Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Many Thanks

Answer 1

It sounds like you want to do image detection and / or tracking.

The EmguCV ( http://www.emgu.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page ) library provides a good foundation for this sort of thing in .Net. e.g. http://www.emgu.com/wiki/index.php/Tutorial#Examples

It's a pretty meaty subject with quite a few years and different branches of research associated with it so I'm not sure anyone can give the definitive guide to such things but reading up neural networks and related topics would give you a pretty good grounding in the way EmguCV and related libraries manage it.

It should be noted that systems such as EmguCV are designed to recognise predefined items within a scene (such as a licence plate number) rather than an arbitory feature within a scene.

For arbitory tracking of a given feature, a search for research papers on edge detection and the like (in combination with a library such a EmguCV) is probably a good start. (You also may want to sneak a peek at an existing application such as http://www.pfhoe.com/ to see if it fits your needs)