[Tom Line]

We have absolutely horrible lighting in our workshop - it's flourescent tubes every 3 or four feet. Our camera always points upwards and is mounted in a fixed orientation.

The best procedure we have come up with for camera tuning in labview goes like this:

1. Enable HSL debugging in the Find Two colors VI.
2. Enable HSL coloring in the Vision VI.
3. Hover your mouse over different parts of the greent target. Try to hover it over a dark patch of green and a bright patch of green. Watch your initial HSL values from the HSL debugging window. Note the maximum for each value, and the minimum.
4. Return to the Vision window and input them on the front panel VI.
5. Turn off the "find pink first" checkbox and look at the mask. More than likely, you'll see a bunch of noise and your two colors. One of the colors (usually the green color) will be flickering. You also may see a bunch of noise.
6. Make sure you're happy with the framerate before going any further. We're happy if we're seeing 15-20 FPS. We go into the Vision VI and set our framerate maximum to below the lowest number we see (with our tracking code, we very much want consistent values).
7. Return to the vision VI. Methodically adjust your green values up and down by 5 at a time. Return periodically to the HSL debugging window to verify none of your values there have changed.
8. Once your green locks in, go back to pink and adjust the values a bit. At this point you should have a reasonably clean mask, with little noise, and two solid shapes.
9. If you are still having problems, or if you aren't getting solid shapes, repeat the process. If you still don't have any success, we've several times resorted to modifying the area and particle settings to make them somewhat more forgiving.
10. Now you need to turn the robot so the lighting changes and repeat. If you're getting a lot of washout, or the color values you're getting between light / dark patches on the target are significantly different, you may need to raise or lower brightness to repeat. It usually takes us 10 minutes or so to get nice solid values that work over most of the area (we've done this in 3 or 4 significantly different lighting conditions just to practice - bright sunlight, flourescent tubes, and incandescent bulbs).

This has worked pretty well for us in several different very poor environments. I hope it helps you guys.

Team 1718