I’m not sure if PHP is the proper spot for this…
Say I have a video that is 5 minutes long. I have an image that is hidden somewhere in this video. I have a picture of the image available to me, but I don’t know where in the video it is. I would like my program to search the video for the image, and return the time in the video where the image appears, example: 3:15.
Is this possible? Can this be done with ffmpeg/ffmpeg-php? Where would I start?
I’d start with figuring out how to capture thumbnails of a video using ffmpeg (it is possible, a quick google search will bring it up). Then generate a thumbnail for each frame, then compare the images to the one you already have.
I can’t really help beyond that, I have written scripts to generate thumbnails from video, but I have not written anything to compare images.
Thanks for the reply.
I have found a way to look at each frame with ffmpeg-php. “$frame->toGDImage()”.
Now I understand that bit, but like you said, comparing that image to another is difficult. If they were exact matches, then I can think of ways to do it easily, but obviously since it is a compressed video, the images are not going to be 100% the same.
Also, I want to find an image which is not the same size as the full frame. For example, if I were looking for the Facebook logo (http://www.apse.org/images/fb.png), the video might include this logo in the corner of the video as a small icon - so it needs to be able to search for any match within a frame, even if the full frame doesn’t match.
Somehow, Google does this here:
From a video frame, we convert it to an image, and then we could cut it up into a number of pieces by cropping it. At this point, we could have a piece that matches our image, but still it will not be a 100% match. How would I compensate for compression artifacts, color-loss, size difference, etc?
Unfortunately, that is beyond my realm (probably the same reason I don’t work for google :p). I’d search online for tools that perform image searches, and see if you can’t find an existing service that you can send two images to, and get a result determining if the first image was found in the second image.
