what good is this CMUcam v 2.3?
roughwire
Posts: 78
·What does it do? when I used these example codes from this site it doesn't do anything except give off some statistics. I want to use it to see what it sees through my PC. or can it even do that? Is there a certain thing I need to download? Please help, this thing is becoming a boar to me already!
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MIKE
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MIKE
Comments
I believe it will 'auto-track' an attached servo to steer the camera, to keep a 'particular color' centered in the camera's field of view. I believe it CAN download the pixel pattern it sees, but I don't think it can do that at 60 frames per second.
I don't know much more about it than that. What "site" were you running examples from?
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MIKE
the CMUcam2 is a pretty powerful camera that allow imageprocessing with microcontrollers, but you have to do some homework to get the full power out of it. and the key is understanding those MERE statistics you mention.
If you aren't willing to do the work, it's just a brick on the desk. It'll do a lot more than just blob tracking- here's a partial list
• Track user defined color blobs at up to 50 Frames Per Second
• Track motion using frame differencing at 26 Frames Per Second
• Find the centroid of any tracking data
• Gather mean color and variance data
• Gather a 28 bin histogram of each color channel
• Manipulate Horizontally Pixel Differenced Images
• Transfer a real-time binary bitmap of the tracked pixels in an image
• Dump a raw image
• Control 5 servo outputs
• Automatically use servos to do two axis color tracking
• B/W Analog video output
• Flexible output packet customization
• Multiple pass image processing on a buffered image
You will, however, need to be pretty clever and knowledgeable with the camera and vision software in general to get those capabitities from it.
here's a vision tutorial that shows you what you are getting into:
www.societyofrobots.com/programming_computer_vision_tutorial.shtml
Using the camera with you PC requires PC software (duh) There are two alternatives:
1) the JAVA software on your disk that came with the camera- I found it hard to set up and use.
2)CMUcam2.exe written by Tony Brenke-
f1.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/oEQRRv_NOWO2Y_uyeUE-ZFghGuo8oA2X4O5WEoFRy8OTt8gx0PiFVoikxtgGpQG3A1vb97IPmm2FqEFJ0YRwRlNlcKq07REXXEmT04U/Seattle_Robotics_CmuCam2.exe
(you'll need to join the Seattle Robotics Society yahoo group to download it)
Tony's program isn't as powerful as the JAVA software, but it's MUCH easier to use. That should get you started.
one note- to see the pictures the camera sees, you'll need the serial connection to be 115 Kb
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Post Edited (Larry) : 4/2/2007 7:23:52 PM GMT
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Chris Savage
Parallax Tech Support
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MIKE
I took a look in my documentation after Chris' post, and couldn't find a v2.3 for ANY software or hardware (I even went back to the CMU docs. --No dice).
The picture would be the easiest if you have a camera.
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Dave
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Dave Andreae
Parallax Tech Support·
It sounds, from your initial post, like you expect this CMUcam to function as a "real-time" video camera...sending "full-motion-video" to your PC that you can view like a regular video feed. Is this correct?
If it is, then the CMUcam is not the product that you need. The appropriate software can send "still-frames" from the CMUcam, but you would be better served by a wireless camera/receiver combo feeding into a video card for viewing live video. The CMUcam is intended for doing video processing and analysis at the camera end, allowing such things as "object-following".
If I have misinterpreted your needs, then I return you to your regularly-scheduled programming....
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Truly Understand the Fundamentals and the Path will be so much easier...