Hi Chris,

This looks really good mate, and if you can provide fairly distinctive colours it seems to respond really well. The demo looks sweet too

I’m sorry to hear you’re having trouble with the performance of getColorBoundsRect; I’ve found it to be pretty fast, as with most of the native BitmapData methods. I guess if you’re checking for several colours in one frame it could bottleneck, perhaps a possible refinement would be to check one colour each frame, then use easing to interpolate the movement of each colour. So with 10 colours, colour 1 will get updated every 10th frame, but you could store a buffer of its past locations and on the 9 frames that it isn’t being checked just guess its future position, then corrected when it’s turn to update comes around. It would require a bit of vector math, but may be much faster as you’d be dealing with just a few mathematical operations rather than pixel analysis.

Or even simpler, just straight up easing, something like:

// Where updateMarker is a tag which cycles through all trackers, one per frame
trackPoints[ updateMarker ].targetPos = new Point( colours[ updateMarker ].x, colours[ updateMarker ].y );
// For all other points
for (var i:int = 0; i < numTrackers; i++)
{
// Discard the one just updated
if ( i == updateMarker ) continue;

// Ease all others
trackPoints[i].x += (trackPoints[i].targetPos.x – trackPoints[i].x) / numTrackers;
trackPoints[i].y += (trackPoints[i].targetPos.y – trackPoints[i].y) / numTrackers;
}

So are you tracking the colour within areas where movement is already being detected? Or is this straight up colour detection on the raw camera image?

Nice to see the research is coming along well

Justin,

At the time I commented on your blog I was having performance issues with getColorBoundsRect, but not since. A lot changes in a couple hours

That is a great idea for optimizing performance however.

To answer your question I’m tracking raw cam image. I also have another version that just tracks color on the motion area.

Hello,

I’m working on a school project that needs to track different color balls using a webcam and do some basic analysis on them, is there somewhere I can see the source for what you’ve created here?

Thanks a lot.

Idan

Hi,

I’m working on trying to create my own version of your movie, I was woundering what do you put in this array:

_colorArray[i].

how do you give flash a tollerance for colors?

Thanks

Idan

[...] Without Interfaces” at Show and Tell Pdx. I showed off some Flash motion detection, Flash color detection and even demo’d a little voice speech recognition in Flash. Some of you asked for more info [...]

Hello,
Great job !

I’m a beginner and i try to do some tracking with webcam. I would know how can i detect one colour and use the _x and the _y to move a Movie Clip.

I don’t know how get the _y and the _x from the GetColoursBoundsRect ?
How do you do that thing on your example ?

Thanks

Yann

Great work and really helpful tip regarding getColorBoundsRec()
I will definitely use that for some interesting web camera fun.
Its just what I was looking for, Thanks!

Stephan Tanguay’s last blog post..Vote For My First Webby Award!!!

ehh.. love it..

[...] such method is shown above and can be found on Chris Tesos’ blog. This works by capturing the camera data to a BitmapData class. When you click it defines the [...]