Frame Grabber using FPGA thru webcam

--- In f..., 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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http://members.optushome.com.au/jekent

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rtstofer wrote:
> --- In f..., 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

Tsais 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.
>
>

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

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--- In f..., 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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