Thank you for making Yawcam available. Just started playing with Yawcam, and found it to be very functional and very easy to set up and operate. Yawcam has all the essential features and runs reliably on my machine. Yawcam's problem is its speed. The motion-triggered image capture seems too slow to capture people walking by the camera.
I'm running Yawcam on a modern 2.8 GHz Pentium D with 1 GB RAM and Vista. I tried it on a 2.2 GHz P4 running XP with the same results. Basically a webcam is watching people walking by an entrance. Many images it captures are empty of the person who triggered the motion. It's almost as if the motion detection triggers a frame capture, but by the time the next frame is captured, the subject is already gone. I'm guessing the image capture is triggered as follows:
if (frame1 - frame2) > THRESHOLD then capture(frame3);
Maybe instead the capture should be something like:
if (frame1 - frame2) > THRESHOLD then save(frame2);
This would at least guarantee that the frame which caused the motion is the one that's captured.
Is interpreted Java fast enough to capture successive motion frames or is the motion detection algorithm itself slow? I originally tried the 640x480 format and that hardly worked at all. Then I switched to 320x240, and it's a lot better, but still too sluggish to capture even a moderately paced walker.
Then again, is it maybe something I'm doing wrong? Does anyone have any suggestions for improving the motion capture performance?
Thanks in advance.