The Ladybug® Software Development Kit (SDK) allows users to fully control the Ladybug2 and Ladybug3 Spherical Digital Video Systems and integrate their functionality with the user's own custom applications. The SDK includes a camera device driver, full software library and Application Programming Interface (API), and example programs and source code for a quick start in the C/C++ programming environment.

*New features in Ladybug SDK version 1.5 Alpha*
Improved thread safety and asynchronous file reading and writing, providing better support for pipelining of the image processing core. Users can now fully utilize the resources available on higher end PCs with greater than 4 cores and faster hard drives. The result is improved update rates during capture and storage and faster post processing. Other new features include one shot auto white balance support via the API, and a stream file recovery feature allowing users to recover stream files which have been closed incorrectly.

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• Acquire and color process images using a variety of different color processing algorithms
• Stream images off of the camera for the purposes of viewing.
• Control the level of JPEG compression being applied by the Ladybug2 or Ladybug3.
• Access images in Ladybug2 and Ladybug3 stream files located on the host computer.
• Display fully stitched panoramic and spherical images.
• Access other camera settings and information, including:
  • Auto exposure
  • Gain
  • Shutter
  • White balance
  • Frame rate
  • Image Stabilization
  • Independent sensor control

• Rectification, stitching and blending are done live on the graphics card.
• The SDK takes advantage of the OpenGL computer graphics library to texture map the inside of an OpenGL sphere or cylinder, which can then be rendered.
• Rendering options include a virtual camera view from the inside of the sphere or a panoramic rendering of the sphere. Hardware acceleration of the rendering can be achieved on most modern graphics cards.

• Effective warping and stitching of the images produced by the camera system’s six sensors is achieved through accurate calibration of the physical location and orientation of the sensors and the distortion model of the lens.
• The Ladybug software manages the camera coordinate system by breaking it down into seven right-handed coordinate frames of one of two types: six independent image sensor coordinate frames and a camera coordinate frame.

Ladybug SDK provides a simple mechanism to produce Adobe Flash movies from the video you captured with Ladybug cameras.

There are two types of viewers – spherical and panoramic.

Spherical viewer also has an interaction mechanism with Google Maps. The map shows the path to illustrate the actual location where the video was captured. The pointer on the map moves as the video progresses. If you double-click on the specific location on the path, the video seeks to that location.

Panoramic viewer gives you the full field of view of the camera while spherical viewer gives you pan, tilt and zoom control to display the partial image you want to see.