Concept: Geert Mul
Programmer: Erik Overmeire
Thermographic motion-tracking system

In my work I started to use a Thermographic camera for motion-tracking instead of a normal camera because the thermographic camera ‘sees’ only heat and no light. This filters out a lot of computer vision misinterpretations that occur when working with a normal camera, where shadows or objects can be mistaken for persons.

September 2009:
Erik Overmeire and myself installed a test set-up at BALTAN Laboratories. I’m using a FLIR VSR-6 camera. One of the reasons is that this camera has a nice wide-angle lens that is often useful. Another reason is that the camera can be used outdoors. We are using Max-MSP both to control the camera, and for motion-tracking. As for the computer, we bought a Pear-C, a mac-clone, basically a PC with OSX running on it. I have to feed the analogue signal into the computer and I’m using an ADVC-55 for that. The results stemming from the development of the BaltanTracker will not only be the tracker itself but also a library of abstractions that could assist in making motion tracking a lot easier for artists working with Max/MSP. (more…)