A software framework for multisensory environments

Hemal Naik, computer scientist, has designed a software framework to process the data produced by the motion capture system at the Imaging Barn. The software acts as a communicator between the multimodal measurement system and the researchers. He explains: “It has primary functions to read, manipulate and restructure the 3D measurement data in order to do computer vision, machine learning, closed-loop experiments or statistical data analysis.” To make it easily accessible for researchers from other fields such as biology and psychology, the software is written in Python. The code is provided with multiple example cases that allow users to learn different features of the system. “The idea is to develop the framework further and add more methods that are currently being developed through ongoing projects,” says Naik. For him, the most exciting part was exploring different aspects of the motion capture technology in detail. He says: “Once the framework is polished, it could be a handy tool for many researchers. Most importantly, they will not have to reinvent the wheel every time they start a new project.”