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DLTdv digitizing tool

MATLAB tools for digitizing video files and calibrating camerasDLTdv8

Introducing DLTdv8, now with Deep Learning video analysis goodness baked in alongside all the old DLTdv capabilities for digitizing or annotating videos in 2D, or 3D via a direct linear transformation stereo calibration.

Available as a MATLAB app, a packaged binary application for Mac, Windows or Linux that runs without MATLAB or a MATLAB license, or as source code. Please note that installing the packaged binary application recent MacOS versions may require some extra steps; if you encounter problems please email thedrick@bio.unc.edu

Features:

  • Reads directly from AVI, mp4 and MOV movie files
  • Configurable automatic marker and markerless tracking, including Deep Learning for single point, multi-point and multi-camera tracking
  • 3D aware tracking, with user feedback showing the epipolar line and reprojected point location
  • User-specified video stream time-synchronization offsets
  • Projects with videos of different frame rates
  • Displays up to 9 video streams
  • Zooms in or out to any degree using mouse wheel and keyboard controls
  • Requires MATLAB r2019b or newer; the Image Analysis toolbox is required for marker centroid identification & the Deep Learning + Statistics and Machine Learning + Image Analysis toolboxes is required for Deep Learning based tracking
  • Packaged binary versions have full access to all capabilities, including Deep Learning, and can be installed even if you have MATLAB installed

 

Citation – an early description of the digitizing package and some of the inner workings is published in Bioinspiration and Biomimetics; please cite this paper when you publish work using this software.

Thanks to Delyle Polet, Dimitri Skandalis, Elliot Immler, Kenneth Welch, Yoojoong Choi and Suzanne Kane for contributing bug fixes over the years!

 

Online manual and tutorial for DLTdv8

 

Older versions of DLTdv compatible with earlier versions of MATLAB:

DLTdv7: Updated August 28, (2018), now compatible with MATLAB R2018a and and with a major feature bump as DLTdv7.  – DigitizingTools_20180828.zip

Here’s an older version that works with MATLAB versions that have aviread() instead of mmreader() or VideoReader(): DigitizingTools_20090118.zip

 

Tutorials for DLTdv versions prior to 8:

Sample data: Calibrated video of a bat flying in a wind tunnel (29 megabytes)

The mp4 versions of these should play on most recent computers, if they do not then a recent version of Quicktime player should work for the Quicktime versions or an AVI player with the appropriate codecs available for the files in AVI containers. Note that the tutorial is from a much older version; new tutorials are coming but for now these will still help.

Tutorial 1: basic operations and 2d tracking: mp4 (31 megabytes) -or- Quicktime (31 megabytes) -or- DivX5 avi (29 megabytes)
Tutorial 2: 3D digitizing: mp4 (31 megabytes) -or- Quicktime (31 megabytes) -or- DivX5 avi (35 megabytes)
Tutorial 3: 3D calibration: mp4 (40 megabytes) -or- Quicktime (40 megabytes) -or- XviD avi (35 megabytes)

 

 

Page last updated: 2022-10-25