pfm - Read/write 1 and 3 channel PFM files

PFM files are mxnx1 or mxnx3 arrays of floats. C++ code to read/write the format (public domain).
(Source)

OpenCV camera and AVI input

To convert a video to a format that OpenCV can read:

  $ mencoder in.avi -ovc raw -vf format=i420 -o out.avi

This is necessary because OpenCV uses platform specific video libraries, and the intersection of their supported formats is DIB/I420/IYUV. To capture input from a camera or an AVI file, use the following C++ code: [1]. To capture frames in a nonblocking manner in Python, use: [2] with Gary Bishop's cvtypes [3].

Burrows-Wheeler transform in Python

def bwt(s):
  s = s + '\0'
  return ''.join([x[-1] for x in
         sorted([s[i:] + s[:i] for i in range(len(s))])])

def ibwt(s):
  L = [''] * len(s)
  for i in range(len(s)):
    L = sorted([s[i] + L[i] for i in range(len(s))])
  return [x for x in L if x.endswith('\0')][0][:-1]

The Burrows-Wheeler transform [1] is an invertible mathematical transformation which tends to clump related sequences of data together; hence it is useful as a pre-pass for some compression algorithms. The BWT domain in the above code excludes the null character; to include the null character, modify the transformation to also output the row of sorted([s[i:] + s[:i]...]) on which s occurs, then in IBWT simply return this row after the for loop. The Python code above is not particularly fast.

How to put a video on the Web

Install FFMPEG [1], use ffmpeg -i in.avi out.swf, then place <embed src="out.swf" width="400" height="300" loop="false" quality="high"></embed> in your HTML. Optionally, use the -s argument after -i in FFMPEG to change the resolution. If you want playback controls, output to a .flv file instead, download FlowPlayer [1], and modify their example HTML to point to your .flv video.