Tool: ViDAT
File: README
Date: February 22nd, 2010


This suite of tools is designed to overlay video with boxes, polygons, etc. on 
a frame by frame basis.  The primary specification of the drawed objects is 
specified by an Tracking log file that is described in generated with 
CLEARDTScorer.

The suite has two scripts:

 - VidATLog which generates an annotated video regarding a set of parameters,
   a original video, and a tracking log from CLEARDTScorer.

 - Vidat_Montage is an script which creates a mozaic video of a set of input 
   videos.


INSTALLATION
------------

VidAT consist of a set of PERL scripts that can be run in a shell terminal.
Third part software need to be installed:

 FFmpeg <http://ffmpeg.org/>
 Ghostscript <http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/>
 ImageMagick <http://www.imagemagick.org> 
    with JPEG v6b support <http://www.ijg.org>


USAGE
-----

Consult the manual pages by running the commands:

   % VidATLog --man
   % VidAT_Montage --man

EXAMPLE
-------

In order to run the example, please dowload and uncompress the example video and tracking log from:

ftp://jaguar.ncsl.nist.gov/outgoing/VidAT_example.tar.bz2

The following command line will generate a video with the snail trails for the 
frames between the frames defined in the tracking log:

$ VidATLog -i example/sample.mpeg \
           -l example/sample.tracking_log \
           -k auto \
           -o example/sample.new.mpeg

The following command line will generate frames without the snail trails for the 
frames defined in the tracking log:

$ VidATLog -i example/sample.mpeg \
           -l example/sample.tracking_log \
           -onlyframes \
           -o example/sample.frames

To build a montage video from the original and an annotated video, the input 
video files must have the same duration, especially the same number of frames.
To do so, make sure that, if VidATLog has been used to generate the video, 
the '-k' option has the same value.

In the following example, the original video is used as the first input and a 
not trimmed annotated video is used as a second input. To insure that both 
videos have the same number of frames, the '-k' option is ignored, therefore the
number of frames are kept the same.

$ VidATLog -i example/sample.mpeg \
           -l example/sample.tracking_log \
           -o example/sample.full.mpeg
                       
$ VidAT_Montage -i example/sample.mpeg \
                -i example/sample.full.mpeg \
                -o example/montage.mpeg


CONTACT
-------

Please send bug reports to <nist_f4de@nist.gov>

For the bug report to be useful, please include the command line, files and 
text output, including the error message in your email.


AUTHORS
-------

Jerome Ajot


COPYRIGHT 
---------

This software was developed at the National Institute of Standards and
Technology by employees of the Federal Government in the course of their
official duties.  Pursuant to Title 17 Section 105 of the United States Code
this software is not subject to copyright protection within the United States
and is in the public domain. This is an experimental system.  NIST assumes no 
responsibility whatsoever for its use by any party.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS."  With regard to this software, NIST MAKES
NO EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTY AS TO ANY MATTER WHATSOEVER, INCLUDING
MERCHANTABILITY, OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
