It works like this. Once a color is selected from the video, using a seriess of thresholds, the ColorIsolator drops all pixels that don’t fall within the defined range of the target color. The remaining pixels are set to the target color and getColorBoundsRect is used to pinpoint the remaining blob of color. It’s really simple. I had the general idea, but I didn’t understand how to define a range of  color until I found Klingermann’s code.

I would consider this just a starting point. It actually works very well, but there are a number of things that can be done to improve it. Here are my recommendations to try out:

1. Try using HSV color values rather than RGB.
2. Introduce a palleteMap in place of or in addition to the saturation/contrast ColorMatrixFilter.
3. Add blob detection to ignore anomalies/artifacts of the target color.

Download source here.

All I ask is for constructive criticism and to let me know if and where you use this. A credit to myself and Mario in your source code comments would be nice.

Thanks to Justin Windle (soulwire) for a great exchange of ideas for this.

For plotting points, I used this blog post as a reference. The musical notes I exported from Garage Band. Also of note, the USGS does not have a cross domain policy set up for Flash, so I had to proxy the RSS feed with a PHP script. I will probably be adding more features, refining the musicality and adding a UI to this, so check back again sometime.

Click screenshot below to launch it.

UPDATE: Looks like the USGS not only moved their feed, but changed it a bit. For now, this won’t work.