A long weekend at DPI saw me get some sensors up on the grid. I'm using 3 IIDC firewire cameras made by Imaging Source. All three of them are sensing presence. Two of them are tracking motion, and drawing trails that follow where people walk through the space,and one of them is both sensing presence and switching into live feed display when it 'sees' someone in a specific place.

All of this is being done through background subtraction with using a running average.  ie, if there is a change in environmental lighting it will be incorporated into the background and therefore ignored.

Anyway, it was the first time I hooked up the whole system that's installing at the Liberty Science Center, including optical repeater, etc, so it was great that everything worked.

Hal mentioned that I should post about the ease of using multiple IIDC cameras in Jitter, so here you go:  it's easy.  I am grabbing frames at low resolutions - either 160 x120, or 320 x 240, and at that low res I am getting three live feeds into the single firewire bus on my macbook pro (via a firewire hub).  I haven't tried higher res, because I haven't needed to, but I'll post back if I find the time to push up the limitations.

Tracking from one camera to another was going fairly well, but the use of wide-angle lenses wasn't helpful...   with the subtraction I'm using, white t-shirts were a problem, and so when people were distorted at the edge of the field of view, they were split into two 'blobs' by the blob detection. But when they were in the center of the camera's field of view (just being viewed from top down, bird's-eye view), they were just seen as a single blob.