In this chapter, we presented the video acquisition functionality of MATLAB. The first part was dedicated to a thorough analysis of the Image Acquisition Tool, which is a basic GUI-based framework for video acquisition. After presenting a couple of examples on the usage of imaqtool, we moved on to a discussion on video compression and its great importance. The difference in compression ratios between still scenes and scenes with high motion was explained, using two practical, hands-on examples. Then, a small discussion on ways to work with uncompressed videos was carried out, followed by an example of processing video frames in chunks to save space. The next part of this chapter was focused on ways to create time-lapse videos using the command line, either without, or with processing of the acquired frames. The final part of the chapter revolved around the real-time video processing capabilities of MATLAB. In these sections, we discussed ways to speed up the acquisition and processing tasks in order to approach real-time performance. More specifically, this chapter covered:

In the next chapter we will get to discuss various spatiotemporal video processing techniques. Some of them will be just extensions of what you have already learned for still images, while others will also take into account motion that has temporal differences between video frames. Interesting tasks like deinterlacing of videos, motion detection, and video stabilization will be explored, by showing practical ways to achieve them in MATLAB.