Y.I.Riabtsev¹

¹ RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Templergraben 55, 52056, Germany

Abstract. She said she would come. I thought she'd come by nine. I pulled the Venetian blinds on the one window whose yellow light kept spilling across the floor and making it harder to just sit and wait. I could not quite focus: even without headsets, Lou Reed kept coming in waves, sometimes murmuring that he is waiting for a man^[1], sometimes hitting my right ear so hard my whole body twisted up; I pressed my palm against the ringing eardrum, unsure whether it was in the room or in me. Was there an insect, disappearing into the narrow gap under the refrigerator door? I try not to come closer; I am afraid that if I really see it I will kill it, and I do not want to kill anything tonight. She is probably at some factory-style opening, one of those white concrete rooms where Warhol's ghosts play on a loop and Maria Beatty's slow, anachronistic frames stain the plaster - images that barely move while the light on them changes^[3]. I half-remember that same roach crawling across the frozen frames of Andy's Empire^[2]. Where was the woman who said she'd come.^[0] Where is my muse.
Keywords: cli, monitoring, surveillance, event-detection, multistream, cpp23, qt6, stream-viewer.

Index Terms–David Foster Wallace (DFW); Infinite Jest (IJ); IEEE (paper format); Qt;Athon 2025; Xmas prizes.

INFORMATION ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Yaroslav I. Riabtsev	orcid.org/0000-0001-5530-3752. E-mail: yaroslav.riabtsev@rwth-aachen.de. Master's student.

Setup and Installation

Requirements

The current implementation and experimental runs have been built with the following toolchain. Functionally equivalent replacements usually work; exact minimum versions are not rigorously specified.

General toolchain

CMake ≥ 3.28 - used as the meta-build system and configuration front-end for all targets in the project.^[10]
C++23 compiler - a conforming implementation of ISO/IEC 14882:2024(E) ("C++23"), providing the standard library facilities used by the project.^[4]

Core library (libyodau)

OpenCV - used for CV-based helpers (lines/ROI/event-detection, future AI hooks). If OpenCV is found at configure time, YODAU_OPENCV is defined and the OpenCV backend is enabled.^[17]
Static C++23 backend reused by both the CLI and the desktop application.
All public headers live under backend/include/ and are intended to be usable without Qt or KDE present at compile time.

CLI tools (yodau_cli)

cxxopts - a lightweight C++ command-line option parser used for configuration of the CLI tools; any reasonably recent release of the library should be sufficient.^[5]
The CLI links only against libyodau and the C++ standard library; no Qt or KDE components are required for headless deployments.

Desktop application (yodau)

Qt 6 (Core, Widgets) - provides the main event loop, application object, and classic desktop-style widget UI for the multi-stream viewer.^[11]
Qt 6 Test module - used for the GUI test harness when unit tests are enabled via -DBUILD_TESTS=ON.^[11]
(Optional) KDE Frameworks 6 and KDEGames 6 - when built with -DKDE=ON, the application links against a small subset of KDE Frameworks 6 (CoreAddons, I18n, XmlGui, ConfigWidgets, WidgetsAddons, KIO) and the KDEGames 6 library for tighter integration with KDE desktops.^{[12], [13]}

Auxiliary tooling (documentation and coverage)

GoogleTest (GTest) - Google's C++ testing and mocking framework, used for the C++ unit test suite.^[6]
lcov - tooling to collect and visualise line-coverage information from the test runs, typically in conjunction with gcov or similar backends.^[7]
doxygen and graphviz - documentation and graph-visualisation tools used together to generate the API reference and structural diagrams from the annotated source code.^{[8], [9]}

Exact version numbers are intentionally left vague; the project currently builds with mainstream C++23 toolchains and commonly packaged versions of the above utilities.

Building the Application

There are two common build configurations: a headless build with only the CLI tools, and a full desktop build with the Qt-based application.

CLI-only build (no Qt required)

This configuration builds the core library and the CLI frontend without any Qt or KDE dependencies. It is suitable for headless servers or minimal environments.

cmake -B build-cli \
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DBUILD_GUI=OFF
cmake --build build-cli

This produces:

build-cli/libyodau.a - the static backend library
build-cli/yodau_cli - the CLI shell for configuring and inspecting streams and lines

The exact set of commands and their semantics is described in more detail in cli-readme.

Desktop application (Qt GUI + CLI)

This configuration builds both the CLI and the Qt-based desktop application. Tests are enabled by default and can be disabled with -DBUILD_TESTS=OFF if desired.

cmake -B build \
  -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang++ \
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug \
  -DBUILD_GUI=ON \
  -DBUILD_TESTS=ON
cmake --build build

This produces:

build/yodau - the Qt desktop application
build/yodau_cli - the CLI shell, linked against the same backend as the GUI

Screenshots

TODO: add screenshots of the GUI with multiple streams, lines, and event detections.

Documentation and Contributing

To build and run tests, enable debug mode, or generate coverage reports:

Build with Debug and Coverage:
$ cmake -B build \

-DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang++ \

-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug \

-DBUILD_TESTS=ON \

-DENABLE_COVERAGE=ON

$ cmake --build build
Generate Coverage Report and HTML:
$ cmake --build build --target coverage

For detailed documentation, see the Documentation and for the latest coverage report, see Coverage.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This work started as my personal deviation from the Qt;Athon 2025 Round 2 brief Option #1, curated with Extenly.^[15] Thanks to the Qt;Athon organizers and Extenly for the prompt. I also thank the teammates who said "yes" to joining, but went unavailable/unreachable by the time I registered the team - the project ended up solo.

Conflict of Interest and Ethics

Conflict of Interest: the author declares no financial or institutional conflicts, except a fully disclosed personal interest in the Qt;Athon 2025 prizes - a Steam Deck (512GB OLED), a 100€ Xbox gift card, and up to 4 hours of mentoring from a Qt expert, with runner-up prizes being Qt Certification Test attempts.^[16] This prize pool is the sole motivation for the project: I would rather win my Christmas shopping than do it myself.
Ethics Statement: development and testing used a mix of self-recorded and third-party video streams. All rights to third-party materials remain with their respective owners; no test media is redistributed with this project.

Security Policy

Please report any security issues using GitHub's private vulnerability reporting or by emailing yaroslav.riabtsev@rwth-aachen.de. See the security policy for full details.

License

This project is open-source and available under the MIT License.

Not-DFW Footnotes

[0] D. F. Wallace, Infinite Jest, 1st ed. Boston, MA, USA: Little, Brown and Company, 1996, pp. 17-27.

[1] L. Reed, "I'm Waiting for the Man," in The Velvet Underground & Nico [LP]. New York, NY, USA: Verve Records, 1967, track 2.

[2] A. Warhol and J. Palmer, Empire [Film]. USA: Andy Warhol Films, 1964, 485 min., black-and-white, silent.

[3] M. Beatty, Ecstasy in Berlin, 1926 [Video]. USA: Bleu Productions, 2004, 45 min., black-and-white and tinted, silent with music; DVD release, 2005.

[4] ISO/IEC, ISO/IEC 14882:2024 - Programming Languages - C++. Geneva, Switzerland: International Organization for Standardization, 2024.

[5] J. Arroyo, cxxopts [Software]. GitHub repository, "jarro2783/cxxopts", accessed Nov. 2025. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/jarro2783/cxxopts

[6] Google, GoogleTest: Google Testing and Mocking Framework [Software]. GitHub repository, "google/googletest", accessed Nov. 2025. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/google/googletest

[7] Linux Test Project, LCOV [Software]. GitHub repository, "linux-test-project/lcov", accessed Nov. 2025. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/linux-test-project/lcov

[8] D. van Heesch, Doxygen [Software]. Doxygen project website, accessed Nov. 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.doxygen.nl/

[9] J. Ellson, E. Gansner, E. Koutsofios, S. C. North, and G. Woodhull, "Graphviz-Open Source Graph Drawing Tools," in Graph Drawing (GD 2001), P. Mutzel, M. Jünger, and S. Leipert, Eds., Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2265. Berlin, Germany: Springer, 2002, pp. 483-484.

[10] Kitware, CMake [Software]. CMake project website, accessed Nov. 2025. [Online]. Available: https://cmake.org/

[11] The Qt Company, Qt 6 Documentation [Online]. Qt 6 essentials and module references (including QtCore, QtWidgets, and QtTest), accessed Nov. 2025. Available: https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/

[12] KDE Community, KDE Frameworks 6 [Software]. KDE Frameworks 6 source info and release notes, accessed Nov. 2025. [Online]. Available: https://kde.org/info/kde-frameworks-6.0.0/

[13] KDE Community, KDEGames / libkdegames [Software]. Common code and data library for many KDE games, with CMake integration via the KDEGames6 target, accessed Nov. 2025. [Online]. Available: https://api.kde.org/legacy/libkdegames/html/

[14] IEEE, IEEE Editorial Style Manual, Sec. "Abstract and Footnotes," consulted and disregarded, Nov. 2025. [Online].

[15] Qt Group, "Qt;Athon 2025 Round 2 Project Briefs - Option #1: Multi-Camera Surveillance ( Extenly)," competition instructions page, accessed Nov. 2025. [Online].

[16] Qt Group, "Qt;Athon 2025 Prizes," competition page / official announcement (grand prize: Steam Deck 512GB OLED + 100€ Xbox gift card + Qt expert mentoring; runner-up prizes include Qt Certification Test attempts), accessed Nov. 2025. [Online].

[17] OpenCV Team, OpenCV: Open Source Computer Vision Library [Software]. OpenCV project website / GitHub repository, accessed Nov. 2025. [Online]. Available: https://opencv.org/, https://github.com/opencv/opencv

Y.I.Riabtsev1