Smau 2008

We’ll be present a the SMAU 2008, the main IT event in Italy, in Milan on October 15-18. Come to see our booth!

Press release update

In the last period no big news, except hard work on development and some articles about us on the national press and by press agencies. Here you have the links (in Italian).

AGI – Agenzia Giornalistica Italiana (11 luglio 2008)

Il Sole 24 Ore – Nova (17 luglio 2008)

L’Unità (21 luglio 2008)

Amped at the Area Science Park Press Tour

Area Science Park, the technological campus where we are located, is organizing for its 30th birthday a very interesting event for the press. Some tenths of the most well known italian scientific and economic journalists will visit today and tomorrow eight laboratories, chosen among the most representative of the center. Tomorrow  they will visit out labs to discover what’s happening here. Hoping for good reviews…  thanks for all those who are coming!

Meet us at the Area Science Park B-Day

Area Science Park, the scientific center where we are located, is organizing a day of meetings between companies of our region (and outside). If you want to meet us you can signal your interest through this page, or you can directly write us.

B-Day Home Page

Extracting a license plate from a dark video [How to]

This is the first video tutorial of a series. It has been ripped and then subtitled directly without any editing, so it shows Amped Five work flow on real time.

The video is showing a very dark and shaking sequence of a license plate. The steps illustrated are:

1. loading the video (Video Loader filter)
2. increasing the brightness and contrast (Curves filter)
3. stabilizing the video (Stabilization filter)
4. integrating the enhanced and stabilized frames (Frame Averaging filter)

Red Prisma meeting 2008 [events]

Last week I’ve been invited to the annual meeting of the Red Prisma tematic network, in Toledo, Spain. The purpose of Red Prisma is to put together researchers, industries and users of imaging and optics technologies, and I guess the result was very good and interesting; there was a wide range of presentations, all of a rather high scientific level, but with a glance to real-world applications. Many of them moreover, were targeted to applications for security and investigations, and madepossible for me to meet and exchange ideas with many interesting people working in this field.

And least, but not list, I had the great opportunity to visit such a beautiful city as Toledo. Really thanks to professor Cristobal and the other organizers for giving me the opportunity to be there.

Red Prisma Blog

An article about Amped [Press]

Yesterday our project has been the subject of a nice article on our region’s newspaper, although the journalist actually made a mistake thinking that our name was “GdS Amped” instead of “Amped”.

Link to the article (in Italian)

Amped Five and the first watch on the moon [Case]

This is a nice and unusual story… we helped some very passionate watch collectors to decide which was the clock used by Buzz Aldrin on the first mission to the moon. Their efforts have gone in many directions, but at the end, even with a little help by Amped to restore a blurred image, the mistery found a solution. Sorry, but the document is in Italian…

Analisi Aldrin’s S/N 43 [via timezoneitalia.com]

Investigative Techniques Seminar [Events]

Today I attended to the day of study organized in Trieste, Italy, about investigative techniques, named “Giornata di Studio: Tecniche di Indagine” (the only link I found is here). Although it was mainly directed to local police, I think it was pretty interesting for al the people working in the field (and probably also for normal but curious people). The first speaker was Franco Morizio (head of the local police of Bergamo), while the second was Luciano Garofano, which in Italy is very well known, being the head of the RIS of Parma, probably the most popular italian scientific investigation institute, which is under the force Carabinieri (subject also of a quite popular CSI-like fiction).

I think I was (except for the journalists) one of the few people not belonging to a Force, and, although the main theme of the day was how to preserve the crime scene before the arrival of the specialists, some hints about necessary rules every policeman should know about investigations have been given. Real tools and scientific techniques and results have been depicted in a very interesting manner, but probably the most interesting part of the day was the short explanation about how some of the most popular cases in in Italy have been solved by scientific means. And everything was made very interesting by the charisma of both the two speakers!

Processing a video in a proprietary format with CamStudio [How to]

One of the biggest problem during investigations on CCTV footage is the fact that most of the systems records in some proprietary format. Although usually encoding algorithms employs the standard mpeg-like algorithms, you won’t be able to view them on common media players. Some are providing a DirectShow or VideoForWindows codec, but most of them allows to view the recorded material on some custom media player. If you want to try to process the video with Amped Five (or some other editing software, I hope not), you’ll need to capture directly what’s happening on screen and encode it back with a more standard codec. Some of these players have some options to save the frames of the video in image files or to export it in the avi format, but quite often you have to save manually all the single frames one by one (what will you do for hours of video?) and the avi file exported will be very badly compressed, further damaging footage that proabably was having a bad quality.

Here it comes in help a beautiful free tool, called CamStudio. You can download the program from here. A very important thing to note is that you need also to recompress the captured video (your hard drive won’t be big enough if you nedd to record more than few minutes) with the minimum loss of quality. For this purpose the CamsStudio author makes available also a lossless codec to install on the system, that you can download here. In the last days the website wasn’t accessible because of traffic limits, but you can still access it by SourceForge.

CamStudio is quite straightforward to use, but I can help you providing the following steps.

1. Open the video you need to capture with its proprietary player. Usually these players will open to fit the image without interpolation at the beginning. Be sure not to resize the window to avoid interpolation artifacts or, if possible, verify that the pixel size set being 1:1 on the screen.
2. Disable all eventual built-in filters, such as deblocking, brightness correction, etc, in order to save the video without any processing.
3. Start CamStudio, select from menu Region and then Fixed Region, then push the button Select. Drag a rectangle around the proprietary player. You don’t need to be very precise and you can include even the window borders, since you can also crop out later the unwanted regions.
4. Select from menu Options the entry Cursor Options and then select Hide Cursor.
5. Select from menu Options the entry Video Options. Select as compressor CamStudio Lossless Codec v1.0. Then set the Quality to 100.
6. At this point you have to set the frame rate. If you set the maximum, the software will try to save as fast as possible the different frames (70 fps on my 2 years old laptop). You’ll be sure not to loose any frame, but the frames will be probably replicated many times before they effectively change (and the saved file will be bigger). You can make a couple of tests to set the optimal frame rate, or if you know it from the player or from the system producer you can set it exactly. If you have replicated frames you can remove it later with Five, but this will be explained later.
7. Start capturing pressing the big red button, start your player and, when the part of the video of interest is finished stop the recording. Then a dialog to save your file will appear. Save it wherever you want.
8. At this point, you can see the encoded video in Windows Media Player; note that this is possible because you installed on the system the CamStudio Lossless Codec. If you try to open with another program which does not rely on system codecs, such as VLC you won’t be able lo load it.
9. Now you can import the video in Amped Five. Start a Video Loader from the Filters panel. Usually you can simply load the video and process it but in some cases (I suppose in files encoded with the older version of CamStudio Lossless Codec), you will need to set the Decoder to DirectShow (for a reason similar to the fact that the video is loaded in Windows Media Palyer but not in VLC), if you played already enough with Five you should now that when you open a video with DirectShow you need to transcode to work on it, so check the Transcode option. The other settings should be fine, since de default codec is set to avi – JPEG lossless. This is another lossless codec to convert to, suggested to avoid again any loss of quality. But, I repeat, usually yhe transcoding is not needed.
10. If you want you can crop out only a desired part of the video (for example if you set a too big area in point 3) with the filter Crop in the Edit category.
11. If at the point 6 you set a too high frame rate you can avoid multiple replicas of the same frame putting a Range Selector (from Select Frames). Just set the first and the last frames in the From position and To position field, check the underlying box and select the approriate step to retrieve only one frame every n (depending on how faster has been your capturing with respect to the actual frame rate). I should tell you that we are currently implementing a filter that should automatically do this, removing identical frames in a smarter and automatic way… but this is not ready yet.
12. Process and enhance!