Handling videos in MATLAB

Note: MATLAB supports only raw (uncompressed) avi files on Linux and only some Indeo and Cinepack compressed versions on Windows. But mostly you get videos in MPEG. So you need to convert to raw or any supported format. For this, FFmpeg can be used (see Section 2). Note: Avi means Audio Video Interleave and is only a container format. Avi does not mean raw video. It is possible to have mpeg or many other compressed avi files. MATLAB can not read such a compressed avi files. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Interleave). /****************************************/ Section 1 If you have raw video /***************************************/ If you have raw video, then handling in MATLAB is quite easy. You need to use functions avifile, aviread, frame2im, im2frame and addframe functions. Following code converts given video (in.avi) to QVGA (320x240) resolution video (out.avi). This example shows how to use video related functions in MATLAB. For further details and other functions see MATLAB help. /***************************************/ % Example to scale a given video to QVGA (320x240) resolution
fin = 'e:\in.avi'; fout = 'd:\out.avi'; fileinfo = aviinfo(fin); nframes = fileinfo.NumFrames; aviobj = avifile(fout, 'compression', 'none', 'fps', fileinfo.FramesPerSecond); for i = 1:nframes %Read frames from input video mov_in = aviread(fin,i); im_in = frame2im(mov_in); %Do processing on each frame of the video %In this example - scaling [ht wd ch] = size(im_in); im_out = imresize(im_in, [240 320], 'bilinear'); %Write frames to output video frm = im2frame(im_out); aviobj = addframe(aviobj,frm); i %Just to display frame number end; %Don't forget to close output file aviobj = close(aviobj);

return;

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/****************************************/ Section 2 If you have compressed video /***************************************/ You can use any converter tool to convert compressed video to uncompressed avi format. One such tool is FFmpeg (http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/index.html). Mplayer, VLC and many other players are based on this codec. If you are a Windows user, just download latest binary from http://ffdshow.faireal.net/mirror/ffmpeg/ (Any virus? I dont know. Download at your risk!). (You can use WinRAR to uncompress .7z http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Utilities/Compression_and_Zip_File_Utilities/Win RAR_Download.html) Use this command to convert any compressed file (compressed.any) to uncompressed avi file (uncompressed.avi) (Note: pthreadGC2.dll file should be in the same directory as ffmpeg.exe). ffmpeg.exe -i compressed.any -vcodec rawvideo uncompressed.avi This should work most of the cases. However, sometimes it may not work (because, avi is a container format by Microsoft! :)). The converted video may have only blank frames or MATLAB may not be able to read it properly. In such a case, you can try steps explained in Section 3. /****************************************/ Section 3 If you have compressed video and Steps in Section 2 does not work /***************************************/ Create a folder by name images Use this command to convert each frame of the compressed video to bmp (or ppm) images and put it into the folder images. ffmpeg.exe -i compressed.any images/image_%d.bmp Now you can use these images for processing. If you want uncompressed avi file, then use following MATLAB code to combine all raw images into a single uncompressed avi file. /***************************************/ %Script file to combine images to an uncompressed avi file
%Directory that contains images

in_dir = 'Q:\temp\ffmpeg.rev11870\images\'; fout = 'q:\out1.avi'; %Output file name num_images = 341; %Number of images %Set a suitable frame rate fps aviobj = avifile(fout, 'compression', 'none', 'fps', 25);

for i = 1:num_images; temp = sprintf('%d', i); name = [in_dir, 'image_', temp, '.bmp']; %For ppm, change img = imread(name); frm = im2frame(img); aviobj = addframe(aviobj,frm); i end; aviobj = close(aviobj); return;

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