Axis Camera Black/White Vission Processing

[sasha831]

Hello All,

Last Year our team used labview, and in our attempts at locating the vision targets, we set the camera to black and white.

However, This year we want to use the sample java code for vision processing, and as far as we can tell, this requires the camera in colour.

We have checked through all the settings when assessing the camera though the browser, and the only slightly related setting that we could find was the colour slider, which was set at 50, and absolutely nothing changed when we changed that to other values(0, 25, 75, 100). We have also tried resetting the camera, which seems to have changed nothing...

Any Suggestions? Or Is it possible to use the provided example with a black and white image?

Sasha

[Zmarken]

According to this (http://wpilib.screenstepslive.com/s/3120/m/8731/l/90348-camera-settings) and the manuals for the Axis M1011 and M1013, the image will only be displayed in black and white if the Color Level setting is at 0.

Which camera are you using, by the way? That would help a bit. And as far as I can tell, if the Color Level's set above 0, the camera'll be in color. So maybe the settings just haven't been applied to the camera for some reason?

[sasha831]

Woops, forgot to mention the camera :P Its a M1011. The color is set to 50 and has definitely been set multiple times. I believe that in our labview code we ran a function to set it to black and white? Maybe someone's heard of something like that and a way to undo it...

[Zmarken]

I don't have a camera on me right now, so I couldn't check, but could the NI Vision Assistant have something to do with it? It couldn't hurt to look at it at least.

[Greg McKaskle]

The VAPIX API, which is what the Axis cameras respond to, lists a property called ColorEnabled. That property causes the camera to return a monochrome JPEG. It will be smaller and may decompress faster.

This differs from setting the color level to zero. A color level only affects how saturated the image is. You'll still get a color image, but with little or no color in it.

I don't know if the Java libraries include ColorEnabled, as it is rarely used.

Greg McKaskle

[MrRoboSteve]

One approach to consider is resetting the camera to factory settings, and then applying only the changes you are interested in. Doing so eliminates any mysterious changes someone in the past might have made, and allows you to configure another camera the same way (e.g., at the competition, your camera breaks, and you borrow one from someone else)

Page 42 of the manual (http://www.axis.com/files/manuals/um_m10_46940_en_1203.pdf) describes how to reset to factory settings.

[yash101]

It's better to threshold a colored image into a binary image. That way, you can filter colors!