Dashboard Camera Image

[v2oxviesta]

I was wondering if there was a way to change the camera feed image in the FRC Dashboard. Our team has a vision processing vi that outputs a post-processed image and I was wondering if I could use that instead of the camera feed on the Dashboard.

[Greg McKaskle]

While it is possible to do what you ask, it will be far more CPU intensive and/or network intensive that other approaches. Here is why.

The WPILib block for sending images to the dashboard sends the original untouched and still encoded and compressed image to the dashboard. This is a simple copy of the buffer and sending over TCP.

By comparison, you are discussing taking that image, decoding the JPEG into a big image, then processing it a bit, and then either transmitting a large image, or compressing the image into a JPEG all over again.

The last few years, the default code has instead send the original image to the dashboard and independently sent data to the dashboard about the target. This target info is then used to do the annotations on the image on the dashboard. A similar approach would be to redo the image processing on the laptop to produce the same modified image that the cRIO computed.

Greg McKaskle

[v2oxviesta]

Thanks