Vision Tracking in Java

[bsudduth]

(Note - I originally posted this in the NI LabView forum. I copied and pasted it over here as I would think it would get more visibility in the Programming forum.)

I am trying to help Team 2751 to do vision tracking for the first time this year. We program our robot using Java, and I am curious how much of the NI Image Processing library is really available to us. A few questions to anyone kind enough to answer:

1. Other than getting the settings from the color thresholding operation, how much of the NI Vision Assistant algorithm prototyping can be transferred to Java? For example, I did some template matching in the Vision Assistant that works well. I can, of course, save the script for inclusion in VI. Is it possible to access VI from Java?

2. In the Javadoc reference, the package to access NI's nvision library is edu.wpi.first.wpilibj.image. It only has the following classes referenced in documentation:
BinaryImage
ColorImage
CurveOptions
EllipseDescriptor
EllipseMatch
HSLImage
Image
MonoImage
ParticleAnalysisReport
RegionOfInterest
RGBImage
ShapeDetectionOptions

These classes appear to be there to support the Java sample machine vision projects from last year. Are other NI image processing functions available through wpilibj or is it just based on the people writing wrapper classes for the functions that are needed?

3. According to the WPI Robotics Library Users Guide - which is ostensibly for Java and C++ - there is reference to the FRC Vision API Specification document, which gets installed with WindRiver. Is it only available in WindRiver? Do I really have to install the IDE for C++ that I don't need since I am using Java NetBeans?

The snippet of information I see in the Library Users Guide says that the FRC Vision Interface includes high level calls for color tracking through TrackingAPI.cpp. It also says programmers may call into the low level library by using nvision.h. Are the trackingAPI and/or the low level calls available to Java? The Java VM we have doesn't support JNI - which is the typical way to make calls to C-libraries.

In summary, it looks like for image processing, LabView has the most support, followed by WindRiver C++, with Java bringing up the rear. From reading this forum, however, I see that several of you are using Java. Are the issues I raise here really not that big of a deal? How did you overcome them?

Any answers and guidance to getting started would be most appreciated. Thanks for your help and good luck during the build season.

Barry Sudduth
Team 2751