Video/​Particle Mapping Software

I was wondering...is there any software out there (commercial or free) that can take a video stream and analyze/map it? For instance, if I took a digital video of some clouds, I would like to be able to import that video into a piece of software and track certain particles from frame to frame.

"Packet sniffers" comes to mind, but I really don't know anything about them.

You searching for hidden messages in the bit patterns or a micro-to-macro-cosmic-pattern-revelation?

I'm not sure what you want to achieve, but Adobe After Effects has a pretty good motion tracker in it, but that would be no use if you want to extract and export a path.

Stephen.

Actually, I checked out a video from the library "Hunt for the Supertwister", and they had a segment where they were able to recreate clouds, and simulate the formation of a twister, based on real world data. Sort of like this page.

So...one of my longstanding ideas was to setup a digital video camera, film a storm this summer, and then be able to see if I can break it apart into patterns of cloud formation (or activity) that could be used in the future to tip off someone if a violent storm was going to form...in particular, one that would lead to a tornado. 

:O

Of course, I also will probably pick up a tuner card for my PC, to see if I can analyze the patterns of static that occur typically before or during one of these violent storms. There seems to be some type of pattern to the lightning (which comes across as a crunching sound on AM), if you tune it to the bottom of the AM radio dial (around 540 kHz) and there is a tornado nearby.  There seems to be a different pattern to the static when compared with a typical thunderstorm, and I've heard this many times, but have not found an adequate explanation.

This is sort of an ongoing interest of mine...in fact, a year ago, I became a trained spotter for the National Weather Service.

billh wrote:

This is sort of an ongoing interest of mine...in fact, a year ago, I became a trained spotter for the National Weather Service.

Not to be rude, but how much training do you need to have to be able to say: "Oh Crap! Run for your lives!"

You would want to check out the software that the film animators like Pixar use to do motion tracking on people wearing special suits with tracking targets.  That's the basis for doing fluid character animation.  I think the video game folks do the same thing for greater realism in sports video games.

I can see a couple of problems trying to do optical motion analysis of clouds.  Ideally, you want to track the particle position with time, so you could also derive velocities.  But all cloud particles look the same, and you can only view the surface, basically.  Internal measurements would require radar, which will also give velociities (speed and vector) directly, given enough transmitters and receivers.  You wouldn't be tracking particles so much as the aggregate property in a "small" volume.

The other problem with optical tracking is what I call the "point of view" problem.  You can write the equations of motion against a camera viewing a solid body in a perspective view.  That's what I did many years ago for analyzing rocket launches of robotic aircraft.  But the solution requires a solid body with multiple targets (such as nose, tail, wingtips) with a known initial position.  Multiple cameras (high speed movie cameras) provide some accuracy.  I derived angular rates and velocity from that data using multiple cameras.  Maybe cutting out angular rates from the solution would reduce the equations, but I still wonder about getting range on the trajectory!

I worked with a post-grad PhD on a project with similar elements when I was in grad school.  The guy was using a pulsed laser to make double-exposure holograms of test particles in a wind tunnel.  The idea was to take a microscope-like device, look into the hologram, and measure the 3-D distances between exposures on a particle (if you look close, they look different...).  Neat stuff at the time.

Thanks for the input, waltal! I did remember seeing some video footage of motion tracking sensors on people (for filmmaking). The more I think about this, the more I realize I would probably have to do it on a bigger level than trying to track individual pieces of cloud.  While I was looking into this, I came across this very weird idea:

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/wtwistqa.htm

USA Today wrote:

Q: I've heard about a guy who was able to predict a tornado by using a bunch of garden hoses all connected at a central spot. Evidently, he could hear sound changes, much as varying levels of water in a thin-necked bottle will produce different sounds if you blow across the top of it. Have you heard anything about this? If so, Where can I find more information?

Answered by: Alfred Bedard, Jr., aerospace engineer, NOAA Environmental Teachnology Laboratory, Boulder, Colo.

A: The system detects very low frequency sound waves well below the range of human hearing (near 1 Hertz) and uses an array of 4 sensors located on an area about the size of a football field.

Because the sounds are weak we need to remove wind noise and hence the use of lengths of porous irrigation garden hose at each of the 4 sensors. Sound appears over the area covered by the "octopus" of hose essentially simultaneously while wind eddies do not and are averaged out. We have detected sounds using this system at ranges greater than 1,000 miles. Low frequency sounds travel in a detectable form for long distances.

Detecting sounds from 1,000 miles out is insane...especially with a bunch of garden hoses.

To answer your question, ScanIAm, the reason they have the training is that half the time the public calls in different cloud formations that are not tornadoes.  This creates false alarms.  There are several types of low-hanging clouds (that do not rotate) that are called in, and the NWS has to weed through those in order to get the message out.  Also, there are very specific places in a storm that a tornado usually occurs, although last year a couple of weird storms had them on the front end...which is rare. The training isn't particularily tough; in fact, it only runs about 3.5 hours.  The point is, they teach you where to look as opposed to where not to look, in order to pass along info that may actually save a few lives or protect some property.

Here are some longstanding problems with the whole process...

a) I live in a rural area.  TV/radio coverage of these events is very poor.  Theoretically, the more spotters you have on the ground, the more warning time you can give. 

b) Sometimes they come through at night.  A visual tracking system would do no good; but some type of radio-based monitoring system could possibly work around this issue (like I described above).

c) Some twisters get rain-wrapped and are almost impossible to pick up visually until they are on top of you.  To some, it may just look like a plain old thunderstorm.  In fact, there was a case of that a few years ago (nearby) where the footage on the news showed what looked like a white set of clouds.  However, if you looked very closely at the footage, you found out it was actually a 1-1/4 mile wide F3. The damage path was over 60 miles long, and I believe at some points it was an F4.  The point is, you could barely see it at times.