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Hello,

I'm a student doing a project on implementing optical flow algorithm
into FPGA.
Basically, i would like to mount a camera ( preferably webcam coz its
cheap) onto a FPGA( my college currently has up2 and up3 @ltera
education board) and it do some image/video processing in FPGA and
display in an LCD or CRT monitor.

As for my part, I'm doing the input part. That is getting the
data(image frames) ready for calculation in the FPGA. the Frame
Grabber should grab image frames from the camera and converts it into
gray-scale and saves it in Matrix form or what ever meaningful form.
It's quite a challenging project Very Happy so, I need all the
advise/help that all I can get.
>From what I read throughout the forum. Is true that is the least
practical to use a USB device on FPGA? The up3 board that I'm using
has USB port, so I was thinking of just using my cheap webcam that
I've already own. What do I need to prepare if I decide to use the USB
webcam? I found out that there's a USB port in up3 board and there is
ip-core on USB in opencore.org. What other better alternatives do you
guys suggest? and what other advises would give regarding my project
on the Frame grabber.

Thank you for your precious time on reading this.

Regards,

Sim

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Sim wrote:
> What do I need to prepare if I decide to use the USB
> webcam?

Make sure that there is an open-source driver for your webcam,
e.g., for Linux. Webcams often use proprietary, undocumented
protocols and compression, and you don't want to waste a lot
of time reverse-engineering the webcam.

Eric

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--- In f...@yahoogroups.com, "Eric Smith" wrote:
>
> Sim wrote:
> > What do I need to prepare if I decide to use the USB
> > webcam?
>
> Make sure that there is an open-source driver for your webcam,
> e.g., for Linux. Webcams often use proprietary, undocumented
> protocols and compression, and you don't want to waste a lot
> of time reverse-engineering the webcam.
>
> Eric
>

Also, you need to be certain your USB core can act as a host because
the camera is a device. There is a HUGE difference. I would think
this USB thing is a gigantic undertaking on an FPGA.

There are easier cameras to use. Just for giggles, take a look at
Surveyor www.surveyor.com. Here a camera is connected to a Blackfin
chip and it ultimately BECOMES a web cam.

The OV9655 camera has a parallel interface which would be much easier
to connect to an FPGA.

Unfortunately, I can't find a place to BUY the camera by itself.
Maybe the Surveyor folks can help.

What you are proposing to build is quite similar to the CMUCam 3
(www.cmucam.org). The CMUCam 3 uses the OV6620 version of the camera
used in the Surveyor.

Richard

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Well, since a lot of people are discouraging to use a usb camera
stating its not worth the time and effort to reverse engineering the
camera and using a USB controller in FPGA is a huge undertaking. I've
decided to scout for more image sensor which has documentation and
datasheet whereas the webcam doesn't have.

Any guys have image sensor experience?

The image I'm going to use has to be in grayscale and down sampled.

As
for trying to convert the image into grayscale form i was thinking
whether that i can use a image sensor with a output format of Y'CbCr
instead of RGB. Then i'll using the Y' for the grayscale since Y' can
be translated into by 0.9*R+0.59*G+0.11*B which is in fact the
grayscale formula? Is it possible to extract Y' component from Y'CrCb?
----- Original Message ----
From: rtstofer
To: f...@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, December 24, 2007 12:37:55 AM
Subject: [fpga-cpu] Re: Frame Grabber using FPGA thru webcam

--- In fpga-cpu@yahoogroup s.com, "Eric Smith" wrote:

>

> Sim wrote:

> > What do I need to prepare if I decide to use the USB

> > webcam?

>

> Make sure that there is an open-source driver for your webcam,

> e.g., for Linux. Webcams often use proprietary, undocumented

> protocols and compression, and you don't want to waste a lot

> of time reverse-engineering the webcam.

>

> Eric

>

Also, you need to be certain your USB core can act as a host because

the camera is a device. There is a HUGE difference. I would think

this USB thing is a gigantic undertaking on an FPGA.

There are easier cameras to use. Just for giggles, take a look at

Surveyor www.surveyor. com. Here a camera is connected to a Blackfin

chip and it ultimately BECOMES a web cam.

The OV9655 camera has a parallel interface which would be much easier

to connect to an FPGA.

Unfortunately, I can't find a place to BUY the camera by itself.

Maybe the Surveyor folks can help.

What you are proposing to build is quite similar to the CMUCam 3

(www.cmucam. org). The CMUCam 3 uses the OV6620 version of the camera

used in the Surveyor.

Richard







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Sim,

I pulled a $9 USB webcam apart and it used something akin to a ViMicro
VC301L USB webcam Chip and an Agilent ADCS-2021 (VGA) camera
sensor chip The sensor chip has 10 bit parallel output along with
Horizontal
and Vertical Synch out put and a 24 - 25 MHz clock input. If you can pull
off the USB processor chip and tap directly in onto the camera sensor
signals,
it would probably be much easier to interface to an FPGA than going through
all the rigmarole of implementing USB. The sensor chip also has an IIC
interface
to program up all the registers, so you would have direct control over the
aperture and timing. You should be able to use Google to locate
the datasheet on the Agilent web site.

Most webcams use colour sensors. I have not read the spec sheet in enough
detail to determine if the data is output as RGB or YCrCb.
As you say, if it's YCrCb then you can simply do away with the
Chrominance component and use Luminance.

I would imagine most webcams are designed around a similar formula
of sensor and USB processor. I'm not sure how the data is streamed
out of USB, but other than the IIC interface I'd imagine it would be
easier to interface.

I wanted to do something similar but my eyesight is not good enough
and my hand not steady enough to work with SMD. If you are in a
University you may have better facilities open to you than the average
home experimenter.

John.
:: aH[sIM] :: wrote:
>
> Well, since a lot of people are discouraging to use a usb camera
> stating its not worth the time and effort to reverse engineering the
> camera and using a USB controller in FPGA is a huge undertaking. I've
> decided to scout for more image sensor which has documentation and
> datasheet whereas the webcam doesn't have.
>
> Any guys have image sensor experience?
>
> The image I'm going to use has to be in grayscale and down sampled.
>
> As
> for trying to convert the image into grayscale form i was thinking
> whether that i can use a image sensor with a output format of Y'CbCr
> instead of RGB. Then i'll using the Y' for the grayscale since Y' can
> be translated into by 0.9*R+0.59*G+0.11*B which is in fact the
> grayscale formula? Is it possible to extract Y' component from Y'CrCb?
>
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--- In f...@yahoogroups.com, John Kent wrote:
> Sim,
>
> I pulled a $9 USB webcam apart and it used something akin to a ViMicro
> VC301L USB webcam Chip and an Agilent ADCS-2021 (VGA) camera
> sensor chip The sensor chip has 10 bit parallel output along with
> Horizontal
> and Vertical Synch out put and a 24 - 25 MHz clock input.

John,

The device is RGB and only raw video. Image processing is done elsewhere.

One neat feature: the serial stream can be I2C or UART 9600 baud.

Richard

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syyang85 wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm a student doing a project on implementing optical flow algorithm
> into FPGA.
> Basically, i would like to mount a camera ( preferably webcam coz its
> cheap) onto a FPGA( my college currently has up2 and up3 @ltera
> education board) and it do some image/video processing in FPGA and
> display in an LCD or CRT monitor.
>
> As for my part, I'm doing the input part. That is getting the
> data(image frames) ready for calculation in the FPGA. the Frame
> Grabber should grab image frames from the camera and converts it into
> gray-scale and saves it in Matrix form or what ever meaningful form.
> It's quite a challenging project Very Happy so, I need all the
> advise/help that all I can get.

Every body can do that.
I want it in BRAIN encoded format. :)
See old BYTE mag's ... for details.

> Thank you for your precious time on reading this.
>
> Regards,
>
> Sim
>

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Hi Richard,

Yeah. My understanding is that he wants to do optical flow calculations.
This involves capturing two frames or a sequence of frames, dividing the
original image into small blocks, say 8x8 pixels or smaller and matching
them
with the time delayed signal. What you get then is a series of
displacement vectors.
This is not unlike the block matching technique used in MPEG encoding.
These displacement vectors will give you an idea of how fast the various
sections of the image are moving relative to the camera.

I have not read that widely on optical flow, but to reduce the amount of
processing, I suspect the block matching is sometimes restricted to
specific features like corners and edges.

So all Sim really wants to do is convert and capture a raw video image
into memory and process it from there, or at least buffer the incoming
frames
so the immediate frame can be matched to what is in the buffer.
If the camera sensor is RGB, then as Sim points out there is a matrix
operation
that can be performed to convert the raw RGB image to YCrCb and because
he only wants to use the Luminance (Y) component, he can throw away the
Chrominance (CrCb) component.

I'm not sure how the USB camera streams data, but it would have to be
transfered
into memory some how to be able to be processed.

The camera sensor streams the raw video so you don't have to convert it to
USB serial and back again. Certainly the PC camera interface handles things
like exposure and so on, but for optical flow, you may want to do that
in the
FPGA anyway, based on the data you receive from the sensor.

John.

rtstofer wrote:
>
> --- In f...@yahoogroups.com ,
> John Kent wrote:
> >
> >
> > Sim,
> >
> > I pulled a $9 USB webcam apart and it used something akin to a ViMicro
> > VC301L USB webcam Chip and an Agilent ADCS-2021 (VGA) camera
> > sensor chip The sensor chip has 10 bit parallel output along with
> > Horizontal
> > and Vertical Synch out put and a 24 - 25 MHz clock input.
>
> John,
>
> The device is RGB and only raw video. Image processing is done elsewhere.
>
> One neat feature: the serial stream can be I2C or UART 9600 baud.
>
> Richard
>
> _
> .
>

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Sorry about the HTML appendage on the previous email.
Trying to edit out all the rubbish that yahoo attaches is a
pain in the backside. I've switched all my yahoo groups
to traditional mode, so hopefully there won't be that
problem in the future.

John.

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Hmmm .... Changing to traditional mode did not make the slightest
difference.
Can some tell me how to change yahoo to text only mode ?

Thanks

John.

John Kent wrote:
>
> Sorry about the HTML appendage on the previous email.
> Trying to edit out all the rubbish that yahoo attaches is a
> pain in the backside. I've switched all my yahoo groups
> to traditional mode, so hopefully there won't be that
> problem in the future.
>
> John.
>

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--- In f...@yahoogroups.com, John Kent wrote:
>
> Hi Richard,
>
> Yeah. My understanding is that he wants to do optical flow calculations.
> This involves capturing two frames or a sequence of frames, dividing the
> original image into small blocks, say 8x8 pixels or smaller and
matching
> them
> with the time delayed signal. What you get then is a series of
> displacement vectors.

The hardware interface between the FPGA and the sensor certainly looks
simple. I haven't played with video (yet!) but there is some
discussion of the transformations in the datasheet. In particular,
they discuss setting the color gains to get a particular gray scale.

I may start playing with video next year with the Surveyor See
www.surveyor.com

There is a user project linked to the page where the objective is to
track small orange squares of tape on a reflective black background
(floor tile) under adverse lighing (reflections, etc). Several
processing steps are taken to remove the reflections, locate and fill
'blobs' and then do edge detection. See
http://www.roborealm.com/tutorial/Surveyor_SRV1b_Trail/slide010.php

Richard

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Hi Richard,

I'm sorry I did not look at your first email closely enough.
The OV9655 looks very similar to the web cam chip I referred to.
It's a pity the camera is not sold separately.
The Surveyor SRV1 looks pretty groovy.

I took a very quick look at the roborealm web site and saw the blob tracker.
I've ordered a book on mathematical algorithms for machine vision that
I saw on wikipedia, so I hope I'll be able to brush up on my geometry
and cross products and so on.

There are a few projects I would like to work on with image warping
and so on. I have the VDEC-1 digitizer for the Spartan 3E starter board
that's been sitting here for the last year gathering dust. And I have the
XESS XST-3.0 board with digitizer on it doing nothing.

I'm ordering a couple of analog cameras for an image processing project
but I need them to be synchronized, so the OV9655 would probably
be easier to do that with.

John.
rtstofer wrote:
> The hardware interface between the FPGA and the sensor certainly looks
> simple. I haven't played with video (yet!) but there is some
> discussion of the transformations in the datasheet. In particular,
> they discuss setting the color gains to get a particular gray scale.
>
> I may start playing with video next year with the Surveyor See
> www.surveyor.com
>
> There is a user project linked to the page where the objective is to
> track small orange squares of tape on a reflective black background
> (floor tile) under adverse lighing (reflections, etc). Several
> processing steps are taken to remove the reflections, locate and fill
> 'blobs' and then do edge detection. See
> http://www.roborealm.com/tutorial/Surveyor_SRV1b_Trail/slide010.php
>
> Richard
>

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rtstofer wrote:
> --- In f...@yahoogroups.com, John Kent wrote:

> There is a user project linked to the page where the objective is to
> track small orange squares of tape on a reflective black background
> (floor tile) under adverse lighing (reflections, etc). Several
> processing steps are taken to remove the reflections, locate and fill
> 'blobs' and then do edge detection. See
> http://www.roborealm.com/tutorial/Surveyor_SRV1b_Trail/slide010.php

You all are forgeting BRAIN-EYE history.
Color processing is only in brains monkey sized or bigger for the most part.
( Ignoring birds ). Try B&W for now.
How big is the virtual world to the eye in question I have?

> Richard

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> I took a very quick look at the roborealm web site and saw the blob
tracker.

I've been playing at the RoboRealm site all day! I have downloaded
there software and looked at the examples. This is important
software. The ability to cascade transformations is very clever.

I have ordered the USB WebCam, joystick and USB missle launcher for
the missle launcher project. My grandson will love it!

> I've ordered a book on mathematical algorithms for machine vision
that
> I saw on wikipedia, so I hope I'll be able to brush up on my
geometry
> and cross products and so on.

Which book did you order? I have no references on machine vision and
matrix algebra was awhile ago.

Richard

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Hi Richard,

rtstofer wrote:
>
> I've been playing at the RoboRealm site all day! I have downloaded
> there software and looked at the examples. This is important
> software. The ability to cascade transformations is very clever.
>
>
There used to be a good image processing package for Linux called Khoros.
I don't think it is available any more.

It used what they called Glyphs or graphical icons to represent the
image processing algorithms
and the glyphs were connected together with pipes, where were basically
just intermediate files.
It used a musical metaphor ... so I think Cantata allowed you to design
your own image processing
algorithms. I remembers back in the mid 1990s downloading a 100 MByte
library of
morphological operators from a university in Brazil and marveling at how
you could do that
sort of thing with the internet.

These days I think Matlab has cornered the market on image processing,
but for free software
you can't go past Scilab from Inria. I have not used it for image
processing, but I have downloaded
image processing tool boxes for it. Just too many things to do.

> I have ordered the USB WebCam, joystick and USB missle launcher for
> the missle launcher project. My grandson will love it!
>
>
Grandson ??? who are you kidding ;-)
> Which book did you order? I have no references on machine vision and
> matrix algebra was awhile ago.
>
>
The book I have ordered is:

Handbook of Mathematical Models in Computer Vision
Edited by Nikos Paragios, Yunmei Chen and Olivier Faugeras
Springer (2005), ISBN 0387263713, 596 pages

I don't know much about it, but the title sounds pretty good
and with almost 600 pages it must have some information in it.
"Robot Vision" I think is one of the standard texts.

If you are on Facebook, you might look up the "Computer Vision" group.
It seems I have been made the "Australian Representative", possibly because
I am the only Australian in the group. They have quite a few good links to
computer vision web sites, and might be worth you looking around.

John.

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> > I have ordered the USB WebCam, joystick and USB missle launcher for
> > the missle launcher project. My grandson will love it!
> >
> >
> Grandson ??? who are you kidding ;-)

Of course I am going to play with it first. But I am trying very hard
to get him interested in robotics, electronics and computers. It's a
challenge to compete with PS2 and WII. I keep telling him that the
PS2 has more computing power than the Apollo spacecraft.

> Handbook of Mathematical Models in Computer Vision
> Edited by Nikos Paragios, Yunmei Chen and Olivier Faugeras
> Springer (2005), ISBN 0387263713, 596 pages

I found a used copy on Alibris. All of the new copies are pricey!.
Thanks for the lead.

Richard

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Richard,

There is a computer vision home page here:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/cil/ftp/html/vision.html

The matrix stuff was to do with some papers I downloaded by Horn.

Some Notes on Unit Quaternions and Rotation
Berthold K.P. Horn

Recovering Baseline and Orientation from Essential Matrix
Berthold K.P. Horn

Tsai’s camera calibration method revisited
Berthold K.P. Horn

It looks like MIT have some open course ware, but I'm not sure
what that means exactly and I have not had time to investigate the site
in detail.

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/6-801Fall-2004/CourseHome/index.htm

John.

rtstofer wrote:
>
> Which book did you order? I have no references on machine vision and
> matrix algebra was awhile ago.
>
>

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There used to be a SAAB (?) TV commercial, that said their car had more
computing power
than what it took to land a man on the moon, but it was pointed out to
me that a Z80 had more
power than that. I'm not sure if that is true or not.

John.
> Of course I am going to play with it first. But I am trying very hard
> to get him interested in robotics, electronics and computers. It's a
> challenge to compete with PS2 and WII. I keep telling him that the
> PS2 has more computing power than the Apollo spacecraft.
>
>

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--- In f...@yahoogroups.com, John Kent wrote:
>
> There used to be a SAAB (?) TV commercial, that said their car had more
> computing power
> than what it took to land a man on the moon, but it was pointed out to
> me that a Z80 had more
> power than that. I'm not sure if that is true or not.
>
> John.

I believe the Z80 reference is correct. Among other things I have
laying around is a CD with the design and coding for the Apollo
Guidance Computer (AGC). There is a project on the Internet somewhere
and the CD is the collected works.

At one time I was thinking about building the AGC with an FPGA. The
only reason for not doing it is that it takes a LOT of peripherals
(keypads, displays) and I just haven't become jazzed enough to
actually do the work.

Richard

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John wrote:
> There used to be a SAAB (?) TV commercial, that said their car had more
> computing power than what it took to land a man on the moon, but it was
> pointed out to me that a Z80 had more power than that. I'm not sure if
> that is true or not.

It's in the same ballpark.

There's a great book on the AGC, "Journey to the Moon: The History of
the Apollo Guidance Computer" by Eldon C. Hall.

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Thanks Eric,

I will check it out with my local bookshop.

John.

Eric Smith wrote:
> John wrote:
>
>> There used to be a SAAB (?) TV commercial, that said their car had more
>> computing power than what it took to land a man on the moon, but it was
>> pointed out to me that a Z80 had more power than that. I'm not sure if
>> that is true or not.
>>
>
> It's in the same ballpark.
>
> There's a great book on the AGC, "Journey to the Moon: The History of
> the Apollo Guidance Computer" by Eldon C. Hall.
>
>

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The development of the CPU and the code along with the listing are availabl=
e on the net somewhere but I =A0don't have the link to hand but=A0http://en=
.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer is a good place to start.

This material was one of the things that got me started with the idea of us=
ing a FPGA to implement a CPU.

----- Original Message -----
From: John Kent
Date: Friday, December 28, 2007 7:21 pm
Subject: Re: [fpga-cpu] Re: Frame Grabber using FPGA thru webcam
To: f...@yahoogroups.com

> Thanks Eric,
>=20
> I will check it out with my local bookshop.
>=20
> John.
>=20
> Eric Smith wrote:
> > John wrote:
> >=A0=A0=20
> >> There used to be a SAAB (?) TV commercial, that said their=20
> car had more
> >> computing power than what it took to land a man on the moon,=20
> but it was
> >> pointed out to me that a Z80 had more power than that. I'm=20
> not sure if
> >> that is true or not.
> >>=A0=A0=A0=A0=20
> >
> > It's in the same ballpark.
> >
> > There's a great book on the AGC, "Journey to the Moon: The=20
> History of
> > the Apollo Guidance Computer" by Eldon C. Hall.
> >
> >=A0=A0=20
>=20
> --=20
> http://www.johnkent.com.au
> http://members.optushome.com.au/jekent
>=20
>
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om=20

=20


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Hi Veronica,

Thanks for the URL. I never think to look up Wikipedia.

It says the Block I computer was built out of 4,100 ICs using only 3
input NOR gates !
I'm not sure if they got more than one NOR gate into a package.
Talk about doing it the hard way :-)

John.

Veronica Merryfield wrote:
> The development of the CPU and the code along with the listing are available on the net somewhere but I don't have the link to hand but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer is a good place to start.
>
> This material was one of the things that got me started with the idea of using a FPGA to implement a CPU.
>
>

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----- Original Message -----
From: "John Kent"
To:
Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2007 10:51 AM
Subject: Re: [fpga-cpu] Re: Frame Grabber using FPGA thru webcam
> Hi Veronica,
>
> Thanks for the URL. I never think to look up Wikipedia.
>
> It says the Block I computer was built out of 4,100 ICs using only 3
> input NOR gates !
> I'm not sure if they got more than one NOR gate into a package.
> Talk about doing it the hard way :-)

They were probably the RTL (resistor-transistor logic) chips that were the
first logic ICs. NOR was easier to make than NAND. I bought some of those
chips when they first came available - 3.6V operation and *lots* of
currrent. They had two gates in each 8-pin package.

Leon

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Hi Leon,

Yes, the Wikipedia page says they were RTL.
It says they had problems with the mixed DTL (Diode Transistor Logic)
and DL (Diode Logic) from TI.

I think the web site mentions flat pack technology, so they might have
used thick film substrates to connect them.

I remember buying a couple Fairchild uL900 series RTL gates years ago.
I think I might still have them.
They were in an epoxy 8 pin package.

http://www.electronballet.com/DataSheets/Fairchild%20Micrologic%201/

John.

Leon wrote:
>
> They were probably the RTL (resistor-transistor logic) chips that were the
> first logic ICs. NOR was easier to make than NAND. I bought some of those
> chips when they first came available - 3.6V operation and *lots* of
> currrent. They had two gates in each 8-pin package.
>
> Leon
>

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----- Original Message -----
From: "John Kent"
To:
Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2007 11:33 AM
Subject: Re: [fpga-cpu] Re: Frame Grabber using FPGA thru webcam
> Hi Leon,
>
> Yes, the Wikipedia page says they were RTL.
> It says they had problems with the mixed DTL (Diode Transistor Logic)
> and DL (Diode Logic) from TI.
>
> I think the web site mentions flat pack technology, so they might have
> used thick film substrates to connect them.
>
> I remember buying a couple Fairchild uL900 series RTL gates years ago.
> I think I might still have them.
> They were in an epoxy 8 pin package.

Those were the ones I played with, although I later got some DIL ones made
by Motorola.

Leon

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John wrote:
> It says the Block I computer was built out of 4,100 ICs using only 3
> input NOR gates !
> I'm not sure if they got more than one NOR gate into a package.

In the Block I AGC, the chips had a single gate each. In the Block II
AGC, they had two gates each.

> Talk about doing it the hard way :-)

In the early 1960s, that was the easy way, at least if you wanted the
computer to be small. The only alternative was discrete components,
perhaps packaged as hybrid modules.

Leon wrote:
> They were probably the RTL (resistor-transistor logic) chips that were the
> first logic ICs.

I think you're correct that they are RTL, but they are not part of the
900-series RTL family of parts that evolved several years later.

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unsubscribe
_________________________________________________________________
Fancy some celeb spotting?
https://www.celebmashup.com

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I've just successfully found out the
a simple way of implementing the algorithm using very simple mathematic
calculation during these last couple of weeks. So, that wouldn't be a
big problem anymore.

I've abandon the plan to use USB webcam. I
decided to use image sensors with documentation. Due to the lack of time,
it's not worth the fuss to reverse engineer the webcam. But the thing
is, I've contacted Omnivision which was used by the AVRCAM and CMUCAM and requested sample image sensor from
them but they are slow in responding. I'm worried that I might lose
precious time while waiting for them.

So, are there any other image sensor company that you guys would suggest?

The device has to be able to down sample the its resolution to at least
50x50 and the output should be in YCbCr or BW/grayscale digital format.
What is your advice on selecting other alternatives?
----- Original Message ----
From: John Kent
To: f...@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2007 10:59:43 PM
Subject: Re: [fpga-cpu] Re: Frame Grabber using FPGA thru webcam

Hi Richard,

I'm sorry I did not look at your first email closely enough.

The OV9655 looks very similar to the web cam chip I referred to.

It's a pity the camera is not sold separately.

The Surveyor SRV1 looks pretty groovy.

I took a very quick look at the roborealm web site and saw the blob tracker.

I've ordered a book on mathematical algorithms for machine vision that

I saw on wikipedia, so I hope I'll be able to brush up on my geometry

and cross products and so on.

There are a few projects I would like to work on with image warping

and so on. I have the VDEC-1 digitizer for the Spartan 3E starter board

that's been sitting here for the last year gathering dust. And I have the

XESS XST-3.0 board with digitizer on it doing nothing.

I'm ordering a couple of analog cameras for an image processing project

but I need them to be synchronized, so the OV9655 would probably

be easier to do that with.

John.

rtstofer wrote:

> The hardware interface between the FPGA and the sensor certainly looks

> simple. I haven't played with video (yet!) but there is some

> discussion of the transformations in the datasheet. In particular,

> they discuss setting the color gains to get a particular gray scale.

>

> I may start playing with video next year with the Surveyor See

> www.surveyor. com

>

> There is a user project linked to the page where the objective is to

> track small orange squares of tape on a reflective black background

> (floor tile) under adverse lighing (reflections, etc). Several

> processing steps are taken to remove the reflections, locate and fill

> 'blobs' and then do edge detection. See

> http://www.roboreal m.com/tutorial/ Surveyor_ SRV1b_Trail/ slide010. php

>

> Richard

>

>

>

--

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--- In f...@yahoogroups.com, ":: aH\[sIM\] ::"
wrote:
>
> I've just successfully found out the
> a simple way of implementing the algorithm using very simple
mathematic
> calculation during these last couple of weeks. So, that wouldn't be
a
> big problem anymore.
>
> I've abandon the plan to use USB webcam. I
> decided to use image sensors with documentation. Due to the lack of
time,
> it's not worth the fuss to reverse engineer the webcam. But the
thing
> is, I've contacted Omnivision which was used by the AVRCAM and
CMUCAM and requested sample image sensor from
> them but they are slow in responding. I'm worried that I might lose
> precious time while waiting for them.
>
> So, are there any other image sensor company that you guys would
suggest?
>
> The device has to be able to down sample the its resolution to at
least
> 50x50 and the output should be in YCbCr or BW/grayscale digital
format.
> What is your advice on selecting other alternatives?

If I was in a hurry, I would remove the image sensor from a CMUCam
2. It just plugs in to a header on the uC board. The parallel
interface for that image sensor should be easily available. I'm not
able to get through to www.cs.cmu.edu at the moment, their site may
be down.

Anyway, it uses the OV6620 and I found the datasheet here:
http://www.cmucam.org/attachment/wiki/Documentation/OV6620.PDF

You'll have to review the datasheet but it would seem to me that
downsampling would be done outside the sensor. It does seem to
handle YCbCr.

Another advantage of using the sensor from a CMUCam 2 is that you can
always plug it back in to the uC board and see if it is still working!

Richard

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On Tue, 8 Jan 2008 00:14:01 -0800 (PST), ":: aH[sIM] ::"
said:
>
> I've abandon the plan to use USB webcam. I
> decided to use image sensors with documentation. Due to the lack of time,
> it's not worth the fuss to reverse engineer the webcam. But the thing
> is, I've contacted Omnivision which was used by the AVRCAM and CMUCAM and
> requested sample image sensor from
> them but they are slow in responding. I'm worried that I might lose
> precious time while waiting for them.
>
> So, are there any other image sensor company that you guys would suggest?
>
> The device has to be able to down sample the its resolution to at least
> 50x50 and the output should be in YCbCr or BW/grayscale digital format.
> What is your advice on selecting other alternatives?
>

How about using the element out of an optical mouse? As far as I know,
these are all made by Agilent and are effectively a fast, low-resolution
greyscale camera with a DSP attached. With some models more or less
direct access can be had to the image capture data via an I2C bus
interface.

Here's an example datasheet:
http://literature.agilent.com/litweb/pdf/5988-4289EN.pdf

I'd suggest the easiest way to procure one would be to simply salvage
from a working mouse. That way you get a decent lens too.

Neil
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> On Tue, 8 Jan 2008 00:14:01 -0800 (PST), ":: aH[sIM] ::"
> said:
>>
>> I've abandon the plan to use USB webcam.
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> So, are there any other image sensor company that you guys would
>> suggest?
>>
>> The device has to be able to down sample the its resolution to at least
>> 50x50 and the output should be in YCbCr or BW/grayscale digital format.
>> What is your advice on selecting other alternatives?
>
> How about using the element out of an optical mouse? As far as I know,
> these are all made by Agilent and are effectively a fast, low-resolution
> greyscale camera with a DSP attached. With some models more or less
> direct access can be had to the image capture data via an I2C bus
> interface.
>
> Here's an example datasheet:
> http://literature.agilent.com/litweb/pdf/5988-4289EN.pdf
>
> I'd suggest the easiest way to procure one would be to simply salvage
> from a working mouse. That way you get a decent lens too.

That's a possible way to go, some fellows at my university are doing some
experiments with mouse sensors at the moment, and if I got everything
correct, it's not very hard to get a picture out of the camera chip, but
there are some drawbacks:
- The resolution is not very high, the highest resolution I heard of so
far is 32x32 pixels, the Agilent chip with the datasheet above is only
16x16.
- The bitrate (depth) is not very high, most of the time it is only 6 bit
(64 grayscale levels).
- The samplerate is very high if the DSP does the processing, but the
debug mode of the DSP can only provide a handful of frames/sec (the debug
mode can be used to dump the picture from the sensor, but only a few
times/sec). But it the sensor chip is read directly (eliminating the DSP
completely), framerate should be not a problem at all.

If you'd like to ask them some questions, I can ask them for their email
addresses, and give them to you.

> Neil

Rolf

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I follow your suggestion and I just gave my two old mice in the
garage an operation. I found out it uses Pixart sensor the datasheet
can be found here http://www.datasheets.org.uk/pdf/pan101-datasheet/pan101-datasheet.html while the another mouse from Microsoft is using s2083, it's a DIP-8 IC. From this website http://www.ic2ic.com/search.jsp?sSearchWord=S2083&prefix=S it seems that it comes from agilent, but i cant find the datasheet for it.

A question on the sensor. Can it take image of an object
like say 10-20cm away? Cause, this kind of sensor suppose to capture image of a mouse pad which is very near to the sensor.---

----- Original Message ----
From: Rolf Viehmann
To: f...@yahoogroups.com
Cc: s...@yahoo.com; n...@imap.cc
Sent: Wednesday, January 9, 2008 5:28:57 PM
Subject: Re: [fpga-cpu] Re: Frame Grabber using FPGA thru webcam

> On Tue, 8 Jan 2008 00:14:01 -0800 (PST), ":: aH[sIM] ::"
> said:
>>
>> I've abandon the plan to use USB webcam.
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> So, are there any other image sensor company that you guys would
>> suggest?
>>
>> The device has to be able to down sample the its resolution to at
least
>> 50x50 and the output should be in YCbCr or BW/grayscale digital
format.
>> What is your advice on selecting other alternatives?
>
> How about using the element out of an optical mouse? As far as I
know,
> these are all made by Agilent and are effectively a fast,
low-resolution
> greyscale camera with a DSP attached. With some models more or less
> direct access can be had to the image capture data via an I2C bus
> interface.
>
> Here's an example datasheet:
> http://literature.agilent.com/litweb/pdf/5988-4289EN.pdf
>
> I'd suggest the easiest way to procure one would be to simply salvage
> from a working mouse. That way you get a decent lens too.

That's a possible way to go, some fellows at my university are doing
some
experiments with mouse sensors at the moment, and if I got everything
correct, it's not very hard to get a picture out of the camera chip,
but
there are some drawbacks:
- The resolution is not very high, the highest resolution I heard of so
far is 32x32 pixels, the Agilent chip with the datasheet above is only
16x16.
- The bitrate (depth) is not very high, most of the time it is only 6
bit
(64 grayscale levels).
- The samplerate is very high if the DSP does the processing, but the
debug mode of the DSP can only provide a handful of frames/sec (the
debug
mode can be used to dump the picture from the sensor, but only a few
times/sec). But it the sensor chip is read directly (eliminating the
DSP
completely), framerate should be not a problem at all.

If you'd like to ask them some questions, I can ask them for their
email
addresses, and give them to you.

> Neil

Rolf

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> A question on the sensor. Can it take image of an object
> like say 10-20cm away? Cause, this kind of sensor suppose to capture
image of a mouse pad which is very near to the sensor.---

Without a focusing lense, I don't see how it could produce much of an
image. Besides, the pixel count is too low.

Richard

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--- In f...@yahoogroups.com, John Kent wrote:

> I took a very quick look at the roborealm web site and saw the blob
tracker.
> I've ordered a book on mathematical algorithms for machine vision that
> I saw on wikipedia, so I hope I'll be able to brush up on my geometry
> and cross products and so on.


John,

So, how's it going with the book?

I think, perhaps, I skipped too many math courses in favor of hardware
design. I didn't even do that well with divergence when it was used
for Maxwell's Equations.

Maybe I would be better served by something at a more introductory
level like "Robot Vision" by Berthold.

Richard

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Hi Richard,

I have not got to chasing up the book yet.
We have had days of 40+C heat here in Melbourne Australia last week,
(that's over 100F) and I don't have air conditioning, so I'm sweating it out
and don't feel like doing much.

I think I had the book Robot Vision, or something like it, but it's in
a bookshelf in the lounge room, which is off limits to me at the moment
because my little friend has her junk strewn over the floor.
I use a walking frame, so it's a little difficult to navigate through
the mess.

I'm not a great one for mathematics, which is why I'm buying the book.
I would like to undertake a PhD this year, finances willing, so need to
brush up on my maths. I'm particularly interested in the maths for graphics
rendering of 3D models.

Years ago, I bought a Sublogic wire frame graphics package for the 6800.
We used it for various primitive flight simulators on the 6800 and 6809
using a "chunky graphics" memory mapped display and Bressenham line
drawing routines. It was not real fast but at 1 MHz the system was still
fast enough to play a rudimentary 3D graphics game.

I guess the biggest speed up would be in implementing the line drawing
routines in hardware, but implementing a 3D perspective engine in an
FPGA would be pretty neat too. Having a mouse of tracker ball that
allowed you to rotate a wire frame mesh in real time would be pretty cool.

The next step would be to have hardware to warp and texture map surfaces
onto the wire frame. You'd need a Z buffer to prioritize occlusions, so that
you only rendered the front most surfaces.

There was an article in IEEE Computer I think last year on GPUs.
Much of the perspective and warping transformations would apply
to both the video input and video output devices.

John.
rtstofer wrote:
>
> John,
>
> So, how's it going with the book?
>
> I think, perhaps, I skipped too many math courses in favor of hardware
> design. I didn't even do that well with divergence when it was used
> for Maxwell's Equations.
>
> Maybe I would be better served by something at a more introductory
> level like "Robot Vision" by Berthold.
>
> Richard
>

--
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http://members.optushome.com.au/jekent

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Rolf,

Can I have their emails?

Regards,

Sim

----- Original Message ----
From: Rolf Viehmann
To: f...@yahoogroups.com
Cc: s...@yahoo.com; n...@imap.cc
Sent: Wednesday, January 9, 2008 5:28:57 PM
Subject: Re: [fpga-cpu] Re: Frame Grabber using FPGA thru webcam

> On Tue, 8 Jan 2008 00:14:01 -0800 (PST), ":: aH[sIM] ::"
> said:
>>
>> I've abandon the plan to use USB webcam.
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> So, are there any other image sensor company that you guys would
>> suggest?
>>
>> The device has to be able to down sample the its resolution to at
least
>> 50x50 and the output should be in YCbCr or BW/grayscale digital
format.
>> What is your advice on selecting other alternatives?
>
> How about using the element out of an optical mouse? As far as I
know,
> these are all made by Agilent and are effectively a fast,
low-resolution
> greyscale camera with a DSP attached. With some models more or less
> direct access can be had to the image capture data via an I2C bus
> interface.
>
> Here's an example datasheet:
> http://literature.agilent.com/litweb/pdf/5988-4289EN.pdf
>
> I'd suggest the easiest way to procure one would be to simply salvage
> from a working mouse. That way you get a decent lens too.

That's a possible way to go, some fellows at my university are doing
some
experiments with mouse sensors at the moment, and if I got everything
correct, it's not very hard to get a picture out of the camera chip,
but
there are some drawbacks:
- The resolution is not very high, the highest resolution I heard of so
far is 32x32 pixels, the Agilent chip with the datasheet above is only
16x16.
- The bitrate (depth) is not very high, most of the time it is only 6
bit
(64 grayscale levels).
- The samplerate is very high if the DSP does the processing, but the
debug mode of the DSP can only provide a handful of frames/sec (the
debug
mode can be used to dump the picture from the sensor, but only a few
times/sec). But it the sensor chip is read directly (eliminating the
DSP
completely), framerate should be not a problem at all.

If you'd like to ask them some questions, I can ask them for their
email
addresses, and give them to you.

> Neil

Rolf

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