is it posible to process a 640x480 BW image with the prop in real time or faste

Anubisbot

Hi,
it has been 2 years since i was active with a prop and back then i just did some small stuff.
But now i am looking for a solution where i can capture with a cam a BW picture and find just blobs and turn them into coordinates.

Does some one know if there is a cam sensor what could be hoocked up to a pop, and do that task in 60fps+???

Like the wii remote, it has a cam sensor and captures the BW image and then gets the coordinates of the blobs (ir light ponts).

Best regards Anubisbot...

Leon

640x480 is 38,400 bytes. I don't think it's feasible on a Propeller.

Leon

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Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM
Suzuki SV1000S motorcycle

lonesock

Just some quick back-of-an-envelope calculations:

640*480pixels * 60 fps totals 18.4 million pixels per second processed. With an 80MHz clock the prop gets 20 million (assembly) instructions per second per cog. So 1 cog could do basically one operation per pixel (like "addition assuming there was no overhead of transferring data from the camera or even from HUB RAM (which unfortunately there will be).

Assuming 8-bit monochrome, 640x480 gives you 300 KB or memory needed to store the data, which is quite a bit more than the 32KB total available to the prop for code and variables.

Also, for the calculation of centroids there are multiplications, which are not performed in hardware.

You will need to down-sample your data as you are reading it in from the camera to a much smaller resolution, then from there it is a much easier problem. Also note that detecting the single brightest point/blob will be relatively easy compared to finding the top N brightest points/blobs.

Jonathan

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lonesock
Piranha are people too.

Anubisbot

Thnaks for the quick info, ok seems like i have o figure out a another way , to track the coordinates of 10 ir light blobs.

Best regards Anubisbot

Leon

I'd develop the software first on a PC. You'll then know what sort of performance you need and can select a suitable MCU. We did that where I used to work for a people-tracking system using a passive 16x16 pixel IR sensor.

Leon

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Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM
Suzuki SV1000S motorcycle

Hanno

Check out the OpenCV plugin for ViewPort- several threads on that right now...

RinksCustoms

Anubisbot said...
Thnaks for the quick info, ok seems like i have o figure out a another way , to track the coordinates of 10 ir light blobs.

Best regards Anubisbot

Time and time again this topic arises...
The theory is simple: (for NTSC, same technique applies to VGA)

• Separate V & H-SYNC pulses from the stream.. (you'll be using them for timing)

• Here's the secret, Don't process every pixel! Instead, implement synchronized sampling, (see attachment). Using the H & VSYNC pulses to synchronize the start of a virtual sampled frame, and sampling every 8 or 10 visible pixels, and skip a few Horizontal lines in between the sampled lines you end up with a grid similar to the lower half. Think of instead of plotting a pixel grid, your detecting it..

• By offsetting your first pixel by 1.5 samples, you get a finer staggered grid like that of the top half. The "sample memory" size per frame is the same at the expense of more involved math to establish object tracking.

With this technique, you reduce the virtual detection screen from 192x224 (NTSC approximation), sampling every 4th horizontal line by every 4th pixel per line you get a virtual screen of 48 x 56 pixels. The processing savings are evident: 43,008 pixels vs 2,688 pixels to process per frame. It seems like a good trade-off between object tracking and processing power, especially with the bottlenecks inherent with the Prop. I'm not knocking the Prop at all, but the reality is, a Pentium III would have issues processing that amount of data. The prop can do it, of this i'm sure, as long as the data being processed is scaled down so that the Prop has some "code time" headroom so that the program doesn't crash or become unstable.

Also, if you are using a VGA camera, the HSYNC and VSYNC pulses are already there, and an added bonus is the free filtering by only monitoring the RED channel, since your using infrared leds (the camera has to be able to detect this, most do not).

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Quicker answers in the #propeller chat channel on freenode.net. Don't know squat about IRC? Download Pigin! So easy a caveman could do it...
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Post Edited (RinksCustoms) : 1/17/2009 10:36:25 PM GMT