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Jared Russell 30-04-2012 12:55
paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Thread created automatically to discuss a document in CD-Media.

Team 341 Vision System Code by Jared341

Jared Russell 30-04-2012 13:07
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Attached is a zip file containing everything you need to run FIRST Team 341's laptop-based vision system. We are very proud of this software, as it propelled us to 4 Regional/District Championships and the Curie Division Finals. Every shot our robot attempted in Rebound Rumble was completely controlled by this code.

To get it up and running on your computer (which can be Windows, Linux, or Mac OSX), you first should install the WPI SmartDashboard using the installer which you can find here: http://firstforge.wpi.edu/sf/frs/do/.../frs.installer

Note that for Linux or OSX builds (or if you just want to use more recent libraries than are included in the SmartDashboard installer on Windows), you will need to do the installation by hand. The libraries you will need are OpenCV (http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/), JavaCV (http://code.google.com/p/javacv/), and FFMPEG (http://ffmpeg.org/). Make sure that the OpenCV and JavaCV versions you install are compatible! Meaning the same version number of OpenCV, and the same architecture (x86 or x86-64). You then need to make sure the paths to the OpenCV libraries are in your system path.

To use the widget with the Axis camera, you should configure your camera to allow anonymous viewing and make sure it is connected directly to your wireless bridge (not the cRIO). The IP must also be set by right clicking on the SmartDashboard widget. For best results, you will also want to ensure that your camera has a very fast exposure time (we used 1/120s). The FIRST control system documentation and vision whitepaper go over how to do this.

You can also run the widget in a "stand alone" fashion, as the class has a Java main method that you can use to load images from disk and display the processed results. Sample images are included.

Our vision system uses OpenCV library functions to successively filter the raw camera image and find the vision targets. The highest target detected is then used to compute range and bearing information. With a statically mounted camera, we use inverse trigonometry to find the distance to the target based on the height in the image. Bearing is computed by adding the offset of the target horizontally in the camera frame to the heading we are getting back from the robot. This lets us use a closed loop controller on the robot to use the gyro to "aim". If your robot has a turret, you could instead send the turret angle back to the SmartDashboard and get the same results. The computed range is used to find an optimal shooter RPM, which also gets sent back to the robot. We interpolate between points in our "range-to-RPM" lookup table in order to provide smooth outputs to our shooter wheel speed control loop.

Thanks to Brad Miller, WPI, Kevin O'Connor, and the FRC Control System team for making OpenCV-based vision processing a reality in 2012!

Brandon Holley 30-04-2012 13:32
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Thanks for publishing this. Your tracking was absolutely deadly all season. I'm curious to see how our final algorithm stacks up against your code.

JamesTerm 30-04-2012 14:25
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Thanks so much for posting this... looking forward to reviewing this. It was nice to meet you... BTW I have worked with FFmpeg professionally since 2006, so if you ever have any issues with it, perhaps I can help.

R.C. 30-04-2012 15:14
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
1323 cannot thank Jared and 341 for helping us with vision. By champs we were one of the best shooters in our division.

-RC

rainbowdash 30-04-2012 18:35
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Thanks for the code!

Great job with your camera tracking, Miss Daisy! It was exciting watching all your matches! I know everyone in the chat room was very shocked and sad when you guys got eliminated.

Good luck at your off- season competitions!

RevonZZ 30-04-2012 23:04
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Your tracking system was legendary this year, 341. Heh... One of our running jokes was that your team had an aimbot.

My nerdy friends always called out "HAAAAAXXXX!!1!" when you were on the field. You're pretty good when just playing the game is cheating compared to lesser robots.

Ziv 01-05-2012 00:42
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
This is really cool! I'm looking forward to taking a close look at this at a non-12AM time, but a quick skim left me hungry for more.

We used a much more primitive system to find targets. After even very lenient RGB thresholding, we found that ignoring small particles and filtering the remaining ones for high normalized moment of inertia was sufficient. However, we didn't use any measurements other than the x coordinate of the center of the targets. Your code will no doubt be studied by a great many people, hopefully including all of 125's trainee programmers :).

hodgepodge 02-05-2012 21:40
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
It's great to see how others approached the vision processing. I wrote the vision code for team 118 this year and from a quick glance, your algorithm is quite similar.

Our code ran onboard on a BeagleBone running Linux and straight OpenCV, written in C++. libCurl was used to capture images and a UDP socket spewed angle and distance data to the cRio.

BradAMiller 03-05-2012 08:31
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Jared -

Thanks so much for posting your code. It was good meeting you at the regional and amazing watching your teams robot do it's stuff. This will go a long way to helping teams learn about computer vision processing and raise the bar for future competitions. Expect to see better documentation and improvements for next season.

And thanks to Joe Grinstead and Greg Granito for helping develop the code over last summer at WPI. They did a great job with the camera code and network tables extensions to WPILib.

Brad

sebflippers 05-05-2012 15:58
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Thanks for the code. I believe lines 322-334:
Code:
private double boundAngle0to360Degrees(double angle)
    {
        // Naive algorithm
        while(angle >= 360.0)
        {
            angle -= 360.0;
        }
        while(angle < 0.0)
        {
            angle += 360.0;
        }
        return angle;
    }
could be replaced with
Code:
private double boundAngle0to360Degrees(double angle)
    {
        return(abs(angle)%360.0);
    }

Ziv 05-05-2012 17:50
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by sebflippers (Post 1167236)
Thanks for the code. I believe lines 322-334 [snipped] could be replaced with
Code:
private double boundAngle0to360Degrees(double angle)
    {
        return(abs(angle)%360.0);
    }
Consider the angle -90. Daisy's code returns 270, but yours returns 90. I think you're looking for something more like this:

Code:
private double boundAngle0to360Degrees(double angle)
    {
        double ret = abs(angle)%360.0;
        if(angle < 0.0)
        {
            ret = -ret;
        }
        return(ret);
    }

sebflippers 06-05-2012 11:52
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ziv (Post 1167273)
Consider the angle -90. Daisy's code returns 270, but yours returns 90. I think you're looking for something more like this:

Code:
private double boundAngle0to360Degrees(double angle)
    {
        double ret = abs(angle)%360.0;
        if(angle < 0.0)
        {
            ret = -ret;
        }
        return(ret);
    }
right.

sebflippers 06-05-2012 14:09
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
done. This one kind of defeats the purpose of making your code simpler, though.
Code:
        public static double boundAngle0to360Degrees(double angle)
    {
        return(angle > 0.0? angle % 360.0 : 360.0*(1 + (Math.abs((int)angle)/360))+angle);
    }

Gray Adams 07-05-2012 03:58
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by sebflippers (Post 1167461)
done. This one kind of defeats the purpose of making your code simpler, though.
Code:
        public static double boundAngle0to360Degrees(double angle)
    {
        return(angle > 0.0? angle % 360.0 : 360.0*(1 + (Math.abs((int)angle)/360))+angle);
    }
Why not just...
Code:
public static double boundAngle0to360Degrees(double angle)
    {
        return((angle+360)%360);
    }

Jared Russell 07-05-2012 08:11
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gray Adams (Post 1167637)
Why not just...
Code:
public static double boundAngle0to360Degrees(double angle)
    {
        return((angle+360)%360);
    }
What if angle is equal to -361?

It's awesome that you guys are analyzing the code and you have already taught me something new (that Java's "%" operator works on floating point values...as a primarily C++ guy, I have it burned into my brain that thou shalt use "fmod" for floating point modulus). But if this is the part of the code that engenders the most discussion, then I'm a bit disappointed :)

Gray Adams 08-05-2012 00:11
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jared341 (Post 1167658)
What if angle is equal to -361?

It's awesome that you guys are analyzing the code and you have already taught me something new (that Java's "%" operator works on floating point values...as a primarily C++ guy, I have it burned into my brain that thou shalt use "fmod" for floating point modulus). But if this is the part of the code that engenders the most discussion, then I'm a bit disappointed :)
Ok, fine.

Code:
return(((angle%360)+360)%360);

AlexD744 08-05-2012 19:58
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
I feel like at this point the original code was easier to understand from an outside perspective.

On another note, this is AWESOME! It's nice to see another team using Java to program, especially when it's done so well. Our camera tracking system is currently only used in auton to track after grabbing the third ball off the co-op bridge. It's very rudimentary code so that it can be run on the cRio (we had issues with a bad camera that made it impossible to test any sort of laptop based vision code). This is very interesting, and I'm excited to go over it in more detail later.

Tom Bottiglieri 08-05-2012 20:58
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Thanks for posting this, Jared. I took a look at your dashboard on the field at Champs and was very impressed. It seems incredibly useful to have the vision system draw its idea of target state on top of the real image.

I suspect if vision is a part of upcoming games, we will probably use a solution very similar to this. This year we wrote all of our vision code on top of WPILib/NIVision to run on the cRIO. In the end we got this to work pretty well, but development and debugging was a bit of a pain compared to your system.

Leeebowitz 09-05-2012 09:43
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Very cool! I just finished taking an online data structures course from IIT, so it was really awesome to see the implementation of the TreeMap! Just so that I'm sure I understand, it is used to quickly find an rpm based on your distance, right? What are the advantages (if any) of using this instead of plugging your data points into an excel graph and getting a polynomial best fit equation to transform your distance into an rpm?

Jared Russell 09-05-2012 10:14
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Leeebowitz (Post 1168265)
Very cool! I just finished taking an online data structures course from IIT, so it was really awesome to see the implementation of the TreeMap! Just so that I'm sure I understand, it is used to quickly find an rpm based on your distance, right? What are the advantages (if any) of using this instead of plugging your data points into an excel graph and getting a polynomial best fit equation to transform your distance into an rpm?
The biggest advantage was it made tuning very easy. Take the bot to the practice field with some balls, fire away, and record the range/RPM information into the TreeMap if you like what you saw (we actually had a version of the software that let the operator do this with the push of a "commit" button, but we ended up doing it all by hand just to sanitize the values). No need to fire up Excel.

Jared Russell 09-05-2012 10:16
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom Bottiglieri (Post 1168154)
I suspect if vision is a part of upcoming games, we will probably use a solution very similar to this. This year we wrote all of our vision code on top of WPILib/NIVision to run on the cRIO. In the end we got this to work pretty well, but development and debugging was a bit of a pain compared to your system.
By far the biggest advantage of a laptop-based solution was the development process that it facilitated. Simply collect some representative images and then you can go off and tune your vision software on a laptop without needing a cRIO or the FRC control system.

JamesTerm 09-05-2012 11:06
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gray Adams (Post 1167637)
Why not just...
Code:
public static double boundAngle0to360Degrees(double angle)
    {
        return((angle+360)%360);
    }

Yeah! I like that one a lot...

For the c++ wind river people out there who look at this... you cannot use the modulo operator on doubles but you can use the fmod() offered in math.h

Code:
return (fmod ((angle+360.0) , 360.0));  //c++

//That function reminded me of this one:
//Here is another cool function I pulled from our NewTek code that is
//slightly similar and cute...
int Rotation_ = (((Info->Orientation_Rotation + 45) / 90) % 4) * 90;

//Can you see what this does?

JamesTerm 09-05-2012 11:13
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jared341 (Post 1167658)
What if angle is equal to -361?

It's awesome that you guys are analyzing the code and you have already taught me something new (that Java's "%" operator works on floating point values...as a primarily C++ guy, I have it burned into my brain that thou shalt use "fmod" for floating point modulus). But if this is the part of the code that engenders the most discussion, then I'm a bit disappointed :)
Doh! I missed this before I responded as it was on the 2nd tab...

While I'm here though... if you are a c++ guy why use Java? Is it because it was the only way to interface with the dashboard? I gave up when trying to figure out how to do that in wind river.

Jared Russell 09-05-2012 11:33
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by JamesTerm (Post 1168285)
Doh! I missed this before I responded as it was on the 2nd tab...

While I'm here though... if you are a c++ guy why use Java? Is it because it was the only way to interface with the dashboard? I gave up when trying to figure out how to do that in wind river.
Easy, it's because I am not the only person who writes software for our team! Java is what is taught to our AP CS students, and is a lot friendlier to our students (in that it is a lot harder to accidentally shoot yourself in the foot). I also have a lot of training in Java (and still use it on a nearly daily basis), even if C++ is my bread and butter.

JamesTerm 09-05-2012 14:00
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jared341 (Post 1168288)
Easy, it's because I am not the only person who writes software for our team! Java is what is taught to our AP CS students, and is a lot friendlier to our students (in that it is a lot harder to accidentally shoot yourself in the foot).
Ah ok.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jared341 (Post 1168288)
But if this is the part of the code that engenders the most discussion, then I'm a bit disappointed
Don't be disappointed... this discussion has taught/reminded us something that we rarely use in c++, and this discussion indirectly helped my co-worker fix a bug today. I do know how you feel though as there is a *lot* of effort that goes into this! I had most-all my vision code written as well, and unfortunately it is all going straight into the bit bucket, as we could not get the deliverables to make it work in time. I do want to look your code over in more detail and post what I did as well, and hopefully at that time the discussion will have more meat in it as I do want some closure in the work that I have done thus far.

I will reveal one piece now with this video:
http://www.termstech.com/files/RR_LockingDemo2.mp4

When I first saw the original video, it screamed high saturation levels of red and blue on the alliance colors, and this turns out to be true. The advantage is that there is a larger line to track at a higher point as I could use particle detection alone. The goal then was to interpret the line to perspective and use that to determine my location on the field. From the location I had everything I needed as I then go to an array table error correction grid with linear interpolation from one point to the next. (The grid among other tweaks are written in LUA more on that later too).

more to come...

There is one question that I would like to throw out there now though... Does anyone at all work with UYVY color space (a.k.a YPbPr). We work with this natively at NewTek, and it would be nice to see who else does.

Bryscus 15-06-2012 17:19
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
So after attending the Einstein Weekend debugging session this past weekend and chatting with some of the teams about their various OpenCV implementing vision systems, I just HAD to check out Daisy's code (another suggestion from Brad Miller).

So honestly, I have little experience with Java but figured what the heck since it's so close to C++. After following some of the Getting Start Guides and playing with a couple of projects, I downloaded Daisy's code and set to work running main() and passing the example image paths to the code as arguments. This seems to work well and two windows pop up showing the "Raw" and "Result" images. What baffles me is that I get this as output as well:

"Target not found
Processing took 24.22 milliseconds
(41.29 frames per second)
Waiting for ENTER to continue to next image or exit..."

and for the "Result" image I get a vertical green line more or less in the middle of the picture. I ran the program a couple of times with different images and similar results? Can someone tell this C guy what the heck he's doing wrong? Is there something I'm missing? If you guys (Daisy) were using a different color ring light or something, could you provide some sample images that work? Thanks in advance!

- Bryce

P.S. I'm running this on an OLD POS computer running XP and a Pentium D processor. I'll have to run it at home on something with a little bit of muscle and check performance.

Jared Russell 16-06-2012 16:35
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
The vertical green line is simply an alignment aid that is burned in to each image - it is not an indication that you have successfully detected the target. If the vision system is picking up the vision targets, you should see blue rectangles and dots indicating the outline and center of the targets, respectively.

Which images are you testing with? The supplied images should work with the code "as is". If you are using your own images, are you using a green LED ring? If you are using a different color LED ring, you will need to alter the color threshold values in the code. Note that regardless of LED ring color, adjusting the camera to have a very short exposure time (so that the images are quite dark) increases the SNR of the retroreflections, and makes tracking both more robust and much quicker.

Bryscus 17-06-2012 11:30
Thanks for your reply Jared! I'm using the sample images supplied with the code located in DaisyCV/SampleImages. They're called names like 10Feet.jpg and 10ft2.jpg. I tried about three different images. These look like the same images supplied with the Java vision sample program that I pulled off FirstForge. Does this seem correct? Thanks.

- Bryce

divixsoft 12-08-2012 22:02
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Thanks for this great code, but I would really appreciate it if someone could explain to me how this worked. I open the file you uploaded in netBeans, and loaded the libraries, but I didn't know what the classpath was and there was abunch of errors everywhere. Also if someone could explain to me how the whole network thing worked I would greatly appreciate it. I know this is a lot to ask, so thanks in advance.

divixsoft 12-08-2012 22:48
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
I fixed the errors, but I still don't know what the code does.

Thanks,
Dimitri

Jared Russell 24-09-2012 19:00
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Sorry for the (very) late reply, but it has come to my attention that I erroneously included the default WPIlib vision tutorial sample images in this project (which light the target in red) instead of the green-lit test images we actually used for tuning. I will upload the correct test images when I get onto the right laptop.

Of course, you can also re-tune the color segmentation algorithm to look for red instead of green :)

EDIT: I have uploaded some sample images that should work with the default tuning.

Shawstek 10-01-2013 20:17
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Thanks for uploading this!

carterh062 14-01-2013 09:21
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
3929 was extremely grateful when you posted this code last year. Thanks for posting this extension to setting it up.

twiggzee 02-02-2013 16:12
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
thanks so much for posting this! just got it up and running and it is amazing!! this is our first year doing vision processing so this will help us alot in getting ready for this years competition.

virtuald 06-02-2013 01:45
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
If anyone is interested, I ported the image processing portion of this code to Python. http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=112866

twiggzee 07-02-2013 21:55
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
if it's not too much to ask, could someone please walk me through how to run the code with test images? I put the argument (a string with the path to my test image) in the arguments field of the project properties, run window. but when i run it in netbeans, i get the following errors in the netbeans output window. i guess it is trying the run the smartdashboard somehow, as it is supposed to, but how do I make this work for test images.

ant -f \\\\shs-ms10\\Students\\home\\shs.install\\NetBeansProject s\\OctoVision run
init:
Deleting: \\shs-ms10\Students\home\shs.install\NetBeansProjects\Oc toVision\build\built-jar.properties
deps-jar:
Updating property file: \\shs-ms10\Students\home\shs.install\NetBeansProjects\Oc toVision\build\built-jar.properties
Compiling 1 source file to \\shs-ms10\Students\home\shs.install\NetBeansProjects\Oc toVision\build\classes
compile:
run:
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
at edu.wpi.first.smartdashboard.gui.DashboardPrefs.ge tInstance(DashboardPrefs.java:43)
at edu.wpi.first.smartdashboard.camera.WPICameraExten sion.<init>(WPICameraExtension.java:103)
at edu.octopirates.smartdashboard.octovision.OctoVisi onWidget.<init>(OctoVisionWidget.java:91)
at edu.octopirates.smartdashboard.octovision.OctoVisi onWidget.main(OctoVisionWidget.java:351)

Jared Russell 08-02-2013 10:50
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
It looks like some of the internal changes to SmartDashboard for 2013 have broken stand-alone operation. Never fear, here is how to fix it:

Add the line:
Code:
DashboardFrame frame = new DashboardFrame(false);
...inside the main method before creating the DaisyCVWidget.

twiggzee 08-02-2013 10:55
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
that worked thanks so much!!

mrklempae 09-03-2013 22:15
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Based on what I've read here in the comments, this vision tracking system is legendary. We're programming in C++, so obviously the code doesn't work for us. We've never actually tried vision processing before, and don't quite know were to start. Could you please give a brief explanation of how it works? I really appreciate it!

bradubv 10-03-2013 11:18
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Thanks again to Team 341 for posting this code. It was an inspiration and a great learning opportunity for our programming team. Despite not being able to finish the PID Controller that used the vision code as input we reached the NYC Regional Semifinals.

All the elimination matches at the NYC Regional were played with the SmartDashboards turned off and that put us at somewhat of a disadvantage. I will follow up to see if I can get more details and if any of them are relevant to this thread, I'll post them here. One thing we didn't know going into the competition was that teams using the Java SmartDashboard need to apply the latest C++ language updates. Because we use Java on the robot side that wasn't obvious to us, so we were ignoring the notices about C++ language updates.

RufflesRidge 10-03-2013 12:26
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by bradubv (Post 1245893)
One thing we didn't know going into the competition was that teams using the Java SmartDashboard need to apply the latest C++ language updates. Because we use Java on the robot side that wasn't obvious to us, so we were ignoring the notices about C++ language updates.
This makes no sense. Whoever told you this was wrong. Running the C++ language update on a computer that is not being used to build C++ robot code will do nothing.

bradubv 13-03-2013 20:57
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by bradubv (Post 1245893)
I will follow up to see if I can get more details and if any of them are relevant to this thread, I'll post them here.
The FMS White Paper explains that the default camera settings will result in a bandwidth about twice that allotted. The LabVIEW Dashboard overrides those defaults with more reasonable settings, but if your team uses the Smart Dashboard you have to set the Resolution, FPS and compression settings on your own to make sure you don't go over the bandwidth limit.

Jared Russell 14-03-2013 09:46
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Changing the default camera settings is the most important thing you can do in order to obtain reliable tracking and stay underneath the bandwidth cap.

In particular, there are six settings to pay attention to:

1) Resolution. The smaller you go, the less bandwidth you use but the fewer pixels you will have on the target. If you make all of the other changes here, you should be able to stay at 640x480.

2) Frames per second. "Unlimited" results in a 25 to 30 fps rate under ideal circumstances. Depending on how you use the camera in a control loop, this may be overkill. Experiment with different caps.

3) White balance. You do NOT want automatic white balance enabled! Failing to do so makes your code more susceptible to being thrown off by background lighting in the arena. All of our Axis cameras have a white balance "hold" setting - use it.

4) Exposure time/priority. You want a very dark image, except for the illuminated regions of the reflective tape. Set the exposure time to something very short. Put the camera in a bright scene (e.g. hold up a white frisbee a foot or two in front of the lens) and then do a "hold" on exposure priority. Experiment with different settings. You want virtually all black except for a very bright reflection off of the tape. This is for two purposes: 1) it makes vision processing much easier (fewer false detections), 2) it conserves bandwidth, since dark areas of the image are very compact after JPEG compression. The camera doesn't know what you are looking for, so it will try to send you the entire scene as well as it can. But if it can't see the "background" very well, you are "tricking" the camera into only giving you the part you need!

5) Compression. As the WPI whitepaper says, this makes a huge difference in bandwidth. Use a minimum of 30, but you may be able to get away with more (we are using 50 this year). Experiment with it.

6) Brightness. You can do a lot of fine tuning of the darkness of the image with the brightness slider.

Jared Russell 27-08-2013 17:32
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...82&postcount=5

I posted some detailed explanation about the "magic numbers" in our code in the post above.

fovea1959 01-09-2013 10:29
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
What is best practice for setting the Camera up? Do it in the Dashboard code, or do it in the robot code?


Quote:
Originally Posted by Jared341 (Post 1248042)
Changing the default camera settings is the most important thing you can do in order to obtain reliable tracking and stay underneath the bandwidth cap.

In particular, there are six settings to pay attention to:

1) Resolution. The smaller you go, the less bandwidth you use but the fewer pixels you will have on the target. If you make all of the other changes here, you should be able to stay at 640x480.

2) Frames per second. "Unlimited" results in a 25 to 30 fps rate under ideal circumstances. Depending on how you use the camera in a control loop, this may be overkill. Experiment with different caps.

3) White balance. You do NOT want automatic white balance enabled! Failing to do so makes your code more susceptible to being thrown off by background lighting in the arena. All of our Axis cameras have a white balance "hold" setting - use it.

4) Exposure time/priority. You want a very dark image, except for the illuminated regions of the reflective tape. Set the exposure time to something very short. Put the camera in a bright scene (e.g. hold up a white frisbee a foot or two in front of the lens) and then do a "hold" on exposure priority. Experiment with different settings. You want virtually all black except for a very bright reflection off of the tape. This is for two purposes: 1) it makes vision processing much easier (fewer false detections), 2) it conserves bandwidth, since dark areas of the image are very compact after JPEG compression. The camera doesn't know what you are looking for, so it will try to send you the entire scene as well as it can. But if it can't see the "background" very well, you are "tricking" the camera into only giving you the part you need!

5) Compression. As the WPI whitepaper says, this makes a huge difference in bandwidth. Use a minimum of 30, but you may be able to get away with more (we are using 50 this year). Experiment with it.

6) Brightness. You can do a lot of fine tuning of the darkness of the image with the brightness slider.

Jared Russell 03-09-2013 11:59
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by fovea1959 (Post 1289465)
What is best practice for setting the Camera up? Do it in the Dashboard code, or do it in the robot code?
Neither.

With a laptop (such as the driver station) that is on the same network as the camera, open a web browser and navigate to the camera's IP address (which is set using the Axis Camera utility). From this web interface, you can tinker with all of the settings I mentioned and more, then save them so they are permanent (well, unless you press the reset switch on the camera).

trathier 15-03-2016 09:33
Re: paper: Team 341 Vision System Code
 
Will the code work with any other web based camera? I know the Axis and Microsoft cameras have been in the KOP, but has anyone used anything else?


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