Run SightHound over past video files?

[albright999]

Is it possible to run the SightHound computer vision detection over pre-recorded video files?
I have terabytes of recorded video files from a pre-SightHound video setup. Too much to manually look though, exactly the problem SightHound is great for. Before deleting lots of videos, I would love to have SightHound scan them for me and I can look through the intelligent detections.

Thanks!

[ryan]

Hi albright999,

Sighthound Video is only configured to analyze video streams rather than analyzing a store of pre-existing video files. It would be an interesting feature to add in the future, but I'm afraid there isn't a way to do that at the moment.

Best,
- ryan

[Semper Vaporo]

I'd suggest that you write a program that will emulate an IP camera with the pre-existing video files as the "viewed scene". Run that program in another computer on the local network and feed the video files to SightHound as if they are coming from an IP cam.

There is still the problem that SightHound works in 'realtime' so 8 hours of video will take 8 hours to process.

One work-around to that would be to split the videos into multiple separate streams and feed them to SH as different cameras... it would still be slow to process massive amounts of video; but it could be done while 'you' are off-line and then you can come back when all the video has been processed and use the excellent review and rules features of SightHound to review the processed videos. You would need to pay attention to the real timeline of the videos to determine when events really happened and not the time that SightHound received and processed the video. (Still that has to be lots easier than manually sitting and trying to watch the videos one at a time... even in fast forward!)

[saintjohnny]

I'd suggest that you write a program that will emulate an IP camera with the pre-existing video files as the "viewed scene". Run that program in another computer on the local network and feed the video files to SightHound as if they are coming from an IP cam.

There is still the problem that SightHound works in 'realtime' so 8 hours of video will take 8 hours to process.

One work-around to that would be to split the videos into multiple separate streams and feed them to SH as different cameras... it would still be slow to process massive amounts of video; but it could be done while 'you' are off-line and then you can come back when all the video has been processed and use the excellent review and rules features of SightHound to review the processed videos. You would need to pay attention to the real timeline of the videos to determine when events really happened and not the time that SightHound received and processed the video. (Still that has to be lots easier than manually sitting and trying to watch the videos one at a time... even in fast forward!)

If the video was on tapes one could use an rca to usb adapter and plug a vcr into that as a video source. I have used an RCA to USB adapter for a CCTV camera to work on a PC, since the USB device did the conversion. Otherwise I might setup a camera to record a screen of the video playing if super sharp quality was not necessary for detection.