Digital video recorder for Raspberry PI cameras with multi-camera synchronous acquisition
Ghadi Salem,
Jonathan Krynitsky,
Noah Cubert,
Alex Pu,
Simeon Anfinrud,
Jonathan Pedersen,
Joshua Lehman,
Ajith Kanuri,
Thomas Pohida
Affiliations
Ghadi Salem
Signal Processing and Instrumentation Section, Office of Intramural Research, Center for Information Technology, National Institutes of Health, USA; Corresponding author.
Jonathan Krynitsky
Signal Processing and Instrumentation Section, Office of Intramural Research, Center for Information Technology, National Institutes of Health, USA
Noah Cubert
Signal Processing and Instrumentation Section, Office of Intramural Research, Center for Information Technology, National Institutes of Health, USA
Alex Pu
Division of Veterinary Services, Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, U. S. Food and Drug Administration, USA
Simeon Anfinrud
Signal Processing and Instrumentation Section, Office of Intramural Research, Center for Information Technology, National Institutes of Health, USA
Jonathan Pedersen
Signal Processing and Instrumentation Section, Office of Intramural Research, Center for Information Technology, National Institutes of Health, USA
Joshua Lehman
Signal Processing and Instrumentation Section, Office of Intramural Research, Center for Information Technology, National Institutes of Health, USA
Ajith Kanuri
Signal Processing and Instrumentation Section, Office of Intramural Research, Center for Information Technology, National Institutes of Health, USA
Thomas Pohida
Signal Processing and Instrumentation Section, Office of Intramural Research, Center for Information Technology, National Institutes of Health, USA
Video acquisition and analysis have become integral parts of scientific research. Two major components of a video acquisition system are the choice of camera and the acquisition software. A vast variety of cameras are available on the market. Turnkey multi-camera synchronous acquisition software, however, is not as widely available. For prototyping applications, the Raspberry Pi (RPi) has been widely utilized due to many factors, including cost. There are implementations for video acquisition and preview from a single RPi camera, including one implementation released by the RPi organization itself. However, there are no multi-camera acquisition solutions for the RPi. This paper presents an open-source digital video recorder (DVR) system for the popular RPi camera. The DVR is simple to setup and use for acquisition with a single camera or multiple cameras. In the case of multiple cameras, the acquisition is synchronized between cameras. The DVR comes with a graphical user interface (GUI) to allow previewing the camera streams, setting recording parameters, and associating “names” to cameras. The acquisition code as well as the DVR GUI are written in Python. The open-source software also includes a GUI for playback of recorded video. The versatility of the DVR is demonstrated with a life science research application involving high-throughput monitoring of fruit-flies.
