Looking for volunteers for testing and improving OpenPTV2

[Alex Liberzon]

Hi all, 

Thanks to today's AI agent coding capabilities, I could make a lot of progress on finally leaving behind the C library liboptv, which is about 30 years old and dates back to Maas, Willneff, Luethi, and others, and start with code that is maintainable, installable, and scalable. There is a performance price, but also the computing power today is not what it was a year ago, so things work fine. 

I'm talking about OpenPTV2 or OpenPTV^2 : OpenPTV2 Documentation

I also learned the nice tracking algorithms from friends and colleagues: MyPTV by Ron Shnapp and ProPTV by Robin Barta.  Ron does an amazing job with the code in terms of calibration (new extended Soloff method) and fibers, disks, etc. But Ron changed the axis and dropped the physically relevant calibration method, so I couldn't do it for OpenPTV2.  Robin's tracker is probably the best in town, but I think it's a bit too complex for OpenPTV. But maybe it's worth digging deeper; I just don't have enough time or enough self-funding for Claude :) 

Please, those who can help with funding, with time, and with thoughts - try to help me with your feedback on the documentation, pitfalls, failures, segfaults, installation issues, etc. Please, anyone who knows how to handle a growing community well through a GitHub organization, how to communicate things, and how to grow our community is very welcome.  There is a neat idea on how to use autoresearch or scientific AI to get a joint publication about it, but it needs time and someone to lead it. 

Don't hesitate to ask questions here, but better on GitHub issues. 

Alex

[Alex Liberzon]

https://github.com/alexlib/openptv2

[Alex Liberzon]

It's already at 0.5.8 - you miss a lot of cool stuff if you do not update :) 

uv pip install openptv2 --upgrade

You can see 3D positions almost immediately in an interactive 3D plot; 3D trajectories and epipolars are now plotted, with the epipolar bandwidth shown in the images, etc. 

We create trajectories using 5 different trackers via plugins: MyPTV by Ron, proPTV by Robin, our new Cython fast_3d (no images involved), two-step (3D with completed 2D), and the legacy trackcorr (3D+2D) in Cython. Trajectories now look nicer than ever