RFC - Mark Video as important

[calberts]

I like to mark videos whit clear night or a partial clear night.
Can this be created? The aim is at the end to delete all videos which are full cloudy ;-)

I hoop this request for Change can be done somehow. For me, it's not needed to have a kind of admin interface
local file on my management workstation can be enough although I understood also the security risks.

Hoop something can be added to manage the huge amount of video file.

Chris

[jcauthen78]

That's a brilliant idea - I run into maxed out disk usage on my website quite often and rely on mas-deletes, so having the ability to flag/rename/sort them somehow could be helpful. Maybe check the brightness threshold of the keogram (single line of Shell script), if brighter than, say, .5, affix cloudy to the end of the video file name? Here are a few examples of the last few nights and their brightness thresholds on my end. It's already built in on the main installs with the ImageMagick CONVERT tool, so no new dependencies. I'm not sure how/where to add the file name creation just yet, haven't dug that far, but wanted to through out this thought/option :)

[calberts]

Thanks, the Brightness Threshold can be an idea, cool. but how did you get that value?
I have only this
than it can be even automatically done

any way cool that you like my request let's see how that develops. it can be also a kind of management tool which doesn't influence outside exposure due to security right?

[jcauthen78]

The text for Brightness Threshold was done post in Photoshop, but it's not too hard to do through scripting - I currently Threshold every image and have the value printed on every image (along with lots of other text/data).

thresh.sh
THRESHc=$(convert /home/pi/allsky/images/20220729/keogram/keogram-20220729.jpg -colorspace Gray -format "%[fx:image.mean]" info:)
printf "%.3f\n" "$THRESHc" > /home/pi/allsky/images/20220729/keogram/thresh.txt

This non-destructively loads the image, passes it to ImageMagic (through convert), makes it a grayscale image, then takes the over all image brightness (between zero and 1), then the second line dumps it to a txt file if needed. At least that's how my brain says it works...

Currently i have it tossed in my saveImage.sh to calculate into a variable, and later add it as a overlay.

The logic (in my head) would be something like - EndOfNight.sh -> in the Timelapse function:
N=0.51 (just an example, needs tuned)
Create and threshold keogram.
if threshold greater than N, then create Timelapse and append 'Cloudy' (or some other designation)to the end.
If threshold less than N, create Timelapse normally.

I'm not a professional coder, 80% of my knowledge is all learned through trial and error, and google, stack exchange, and youtube. I'm sure someone can find a way to make it prettier and more efficient. =)

Here's an example of how I have it displayed (bottom left of the image).

[calberts]

This is really cool I do something similar but with star count, I port that to graphana, I will look into this in the coming period to see how this threshold will work. i like the concept

in this image you see the star count versus the AAg weather station correlation

In general, did give me also other ideas if the AAG cloud watcher is for the whole night below the clear threshold than I can act as well this data if for me available in MQTT

Another question is how did you do the overlay of N E S W I am looking for that as well

and how did you the overly of that information in the left bottom, where you display the threshold as well

Thanks in advance

Chris

[jcauthen78]

Here's a little write-up I did for someone else a little while back. . There are a few steps, but it should be pretty decently explained - if you come across any problems, feel free to ask. Line 13 of the main code in the addition I made to the saveImage.sh file is what you're looking for for the cardinals.

[jcauthen78]

I'm digging the star count too, its something I've wanted to give a shot as a rough means of sky quality, but haven't been able to get to it yet. How CPU intensive is the counter?

[EricClaeys]

@calberts, @jcauthen78,
Question about the request: can you define "fully clear" and "fully cloudy"? I think that would be a key to making this work. Does "fully clear" mean every single frame has to have no clouds? Having a star count of every frame (at least every frame where it's dark enough to have clouds) I'd think would help.

The next release of Allsky will make this somewhat easier. You'll be able to add text or images anywhere on the image via a drag-and-drop interface. No more editing source code files. saveImageDay.sh and endOfNight.sh will have the ability to call modules - for example, saveImageDay.sh can call an "overlay" module that adds the text and images. We will also have a "star count" module and an "export" module that exports metadata, like exposure time, mean (threshold in your terminology, Jim), and the star count. User can write their own modules.

@jcauthen78 Jim, if you email me (I don't have your email on my laptop right now) I'll put you in touch with the guy that wrote the star count module.

[jcauthen78]

A few random thoughts - more of a quick brainstorm.

My rough idea was to mean/threshold the resulting keogram during the endOfNight, prior to the creation of the Timelapse. It'd need to be a user variable, like the BRIGHTNESS_THRESHOLD in the config.sh file to exclude the bright images for the startrails; where they may need to do a rough test to see what value (between 0 and 1) gives a fair idea of cloudy vs clear. The idea isn't a 100% catch-all, I think the moon will skew it a little bit too (i'm gonna do a few tests later today to see if/and how far it skews the numbers).

As for defining Clear, Partly, and Cloudy - I'm thinking the 3 keograms I put above are somewhat representative of how I interpreted it. I think the Keogram would be a fair way to evaluate the rough cloud cover for most/some if they're anywhere near a city with sky-glow, as it illuminates the clouds pretty boldly; It's entirely possible my experience/setting isn't like most others, so my process may be a little biased.

Clear/partly = normal file name. 'allsky-20220802.mp4'
cloudy = 'allsky-20220802-cloudy.mp4'

Using the StarCount could also be a way to do it if the value is appended to a txt/log file for every image, then calculate the mean at endOfNight, again finding a value that'd be a representation of clear enough (higher star count) vs cloudy (lower star count). I don't know how CPU intensive the star count calculation is, its possible maybe it can be called during the endOfNight when the CPU isn't needed to process/save the current incoming night images.