About image formatting

Station M time-lapse images contained on 400ft reels need to be in digital format for AVED to process them. Once they are digitized, then are then sent to the AVED process for analysis. The requirements for image formatting are described below.

Image file format

The image file format AVED supports is, in large part, determined by what image format the Saliency Toolkit supports, as it is the primary software used in AVED. However, AVED has many components, including the ability to create an mpeg of the results, which is one of the last steps in the AVED processing workflow. This step only supports up to HD size and will not work for images larger than 1080x720. If images larger than 1080x720 are processed, this mpeg will simply not be created, which is probably fine for this application of AVED, but worth mentioning.

After some minor modification it is now possible to rescale the output for mpeg encoding only into a size compatible with the mpeg encoder, without modifying the raw input images in their full resolution. This is good news !!

The image formats supported are:
.pnm, .pgm, .ppm, .pbm, .pfm, .png, .jpeg, .jpg, .rgb555, .rgb565, .rgb24, .rgb32, .yuyv, .uyvy, .yuv444, .yuv422, .yuv411, .yuv420, .yuv410, .yuv444p, .yuv422p, .yuv411p, .yuv420p, .yuv410p; or, any of the above with an additional .gz or .bz2 extension, in which case the image file will be transparently decompressed.

Directory naming convention

All images directories will be named for the time of the first frame following a modified form of the the ISO8601 convention, without any - or : characters.

For example, 20080607T120256Z_4516 represents a recording on June 7th, 2008 (06-07-2008), and the recording started at 12:02:56 UTC of reel 4516. Frames are assumed to be taken exactly 1 hour apart in each reel and AVED processed results will reference both the ISO time stamp and frame number appropriately in each detected event.