Warning

Kurento is a low-level platform to create WebRTC applications from scratch. You will be responsible of managing STUN/TURN servers, networking, scalability, etc. If you are new to WebRTC, we recommend using OpenVidu instead.

OpenVidu is an easier to use, higher-level, Open Source platform based on Kurento.

Node.js Module - Plate Detector Filter

This web application consists of a WebRTC video communication in mirror (loopback) with a plate detector filter element.

Note

Web browsers require using HTTPS to enable WebRTC, so the web server must use SSL and a certificate file. For instructions, check Configure a Node.js server to use HTTPS.

For convenience, this tutorial already provides dummy self-signed certificates (which will cause a security warning in the browser).

For the impatient: running this example

First of all, you should install Kurento Media Server to run this demo. Please visit the installation guide for further information. In addition, the built-in module kurento-module-platedetector should be also installed:

sudo apt-get install kurento-module-platedetector

Warning

Plate detector module is a prototype and its results is not always accurate. Consider this if you are planning to use this module in a production environment.

Be sure to have installed Node.js in your system. In an Ubuntu machine, you can install it as follows:

curl -sSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_18.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

To launch the application, you need to clone the GitHub project where this demo is hosted, install it and run it:

git clone https://github.com/Kurento/kurento.git
cd kurento/tutorials/javascript-node/platedetector/
git checkout 7.0.0
npm install
npm start

If you have problems installing any of the dependencies, please remove them and clean the npm cache, and try to install them again:

rm -r node_modules
npm cache clean

Finally, access the application connecting to the URL https://localhost:8443/ through a WebRTC capable browser (Chrome, Firefox).

Note

These instructions work only if Kurento Media Server is up and running in the same machine as the tutorial. However, it is possible to connect to a remote KMS in other machine, simply adding the argument ws_uri to the npm execution command, as follows:

npm start -- --ws_uri=ws://{KMS_HOST}:8888/kurento

In this case you need to use npm version 2. To update it you can use this command:

sudo npm install npm -g

Understanding this example

This application uses computer vision and augmented reality techniques to detect a plate in a WebRTC stream on optical character recognition (OCR).

The interface of the application (an HTML web page) is composed by two HTML5 video tags: one for the video camera stream (the local client-side stream) and other for the mirror (the remote stream). The video camera stream is sent to Kurento Media Server, which processes and sends it back to the client as a remote stream. To implement this, we need to create a Media Pipeline composed by the following Media Element s:

WebRTC with plateDetector filter Media Pipeline

WebRTC with plateDetector filter Media Pipeline

The complete source code of this demo can be found in GitHub.

This example is a modified version of the Magic Mirror tutorial. In this case, this demo uses a PlateDetector instead of FaceOverlay filter. A screenshot of the running example is shown in the following picture:

Plate detector demo in action

Plate detector demo in action

Note

Modules can have options. For configuring these options, you’ll need to get the constructor for them. In JavaScript and Node.js, you have to use kurentoClient.getComplexType(‘qualifiedName’) . There is an example in the code.

The following snippet shows how the media pipeline is implemented in the Java server-side code of the demo. An important issue in this code is that a listener is added to the PlateDetectorFilter object (addPlateDetectedListener). This way, each time a plate is detected in the stream, a message is sent to the client side. As shown in the screenshot below, this event is printed in the console of the GUI.

...
kurento.register('kurento-module-platedetector');
...

function start(sessionId, ws, sdpOffer, callback) {
    if (!sessionId) {
        return callback('Cannot use undefined sessionId');
    }

    getKurentoClient(function(error, kurentoClient) {
        if (error) {
            return callback(error);
        }

        kurentoClient.create('MediaPipeline', function(error, pipeline) {
            if (error) {
                return callback(error);
            }

            createMediaElements(pipeline, ws, function(error, webRtcEndpoint, filter) {
                if (error) {
                    pipeline.release();
                    return callback(error);
                }

                if (candidatesQueue[sessionId]) {
                    while(candidatesQueue[sessionId].length) {
                        var candidate = candidatesQueue[sessionId].shift();
                        webRtcEndpoint.addIceCandidate(candidate);
                    }
                }

                connectMediaElements(webRtcEndpoint, filter, function(error) {
                    if (error) {
                        pipeline.release();
                        return callback(error);
                    }

                    webRtcEndpoint.on('IceCandidateFound', function(event) {
                        var candidate = kurento.getComplexType('IceCandidate')(event.candidate);
                        ws.send(JSON.stringify({
                            id : 'iceCandidate',
                            candidate : candidate
                        }));
                    });

                    filter.on('PlateDetected', function (data){
                        return callback(null, 'plateDetected', data);
                    });

                    webRtcEndpoint.processOffer(sdpOffer, function(error, sdpAnswer) {
                        if (error) {
                            pipeline.release();
                            return callback(error);
                        }

                        sessions[sessionId] = {
                            'pipeline' : pipeline,
                            'webRtcEndpoint' : webRtcEndpoint
                        }
                        return callback(null, 'sdpAnswer', sdpAnswer);
                    });

                    webRtcEndpoint.gatherCandidates(function(error) {
                        if (error) {
                            return callback(error);
                        }
                    });
                });
            });
        });
    });
}

function createMediaElements(pipeline, ws, callback) {
    pipeline.create('WebRtcEndpoint', function(error, webRtcEndpoint) {
        if (error) {
            return callback(error);
        }

        pipeline.create('platedetector.PlateDetectorFilter', function(error, filter) {
            if (error) {
                return callback(error);
            }

            return callback(null, webRtcEndpoint, filter);
        });
    });
}

Dependencies

Dependencies of this demo are managed using NPM. Our main dependency is the Kurento Client JavaScript (kurento-client). The relevant part of the package.json file for managing this dependency is:

"dependencies": {
   "kurento-client" : "7.0.0"
}

At the client side, dependencies are managed using Bower. Take a look to the bower.json file and pay attention to the following section:

"dependencies": {
   "kurento-utils" : "7.0.0",
   "kurento-module-pointerdetector": "7.0.0"
}

Note

You can find the latest versions at npm and Bower.