Motion: how it works and what (else) can it do?

[FJofre]

Well, I think the title says all I'd like to know about motion. I haven't found anything about how it works, and almost everyone out there use it to detect motion… and that should be because of its name and main feature but, is there anything else I could use motion for?

I was thinking on some features for example detect heart or breading rate from small variations in the body. Is it possible?

What about variations in colour?

Thank you,

Fernando

[fruitoftheloom]

""Motion is a program that monitors the video signal from cameras. It is able to detect if a significant part of the picture has changed; in other words, it can detect motion. See more below.""

http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome

There is other hardware / software for medical applications, such as

http://www.cooking-hacks.com/documentat ... pi-medical

[DaveDriesen]

Motion can be pretty CPU intensive though..

Don't get me wrong, it's awesome stuff, but in simple implementations it consumes, like, nearly a full CPU core per camera. It does in software what your camera couldawouldashoulda done in hardware.

So considering the pi only has one core, for pi purposes it would be much better to just use cameras that do their own motion detection. These don't even tend to cost much more than their non-motiondetection counterparts.

Dave Driesen
Linux Dev and Oldskool Elite