Yet Another Vision Processing Thread

[ubeatlenine]

Team 1512 will be giving vision processing its first serious attempt this year. I have been amazed by the wide variety of approaches to vision processing presented on this forum and am having trouble weighing the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. If your team has successfully implemented a vision processing system in the past, I would like to know four things:

1. What co-processor did you use? The only information I have really been able to gather here is that Pi is too slow, but do Arduino/BeagleBone/Pandaboard/ODROID have any significant advantages over each other? Teams that used the DS, why not a co-processor?

2. What programming language did you use? @yash101's poll seems to indicate that openCV is the most popular choice for processing. Our team is using java, and while openCV has java bindings, I suspect these will be too slow for our purposes. Java teams, how did you deal with this issue?

3. What camera did you use? I have seen mention of the Logitech C110 camera and the PS3 eye camera. Why not just use the axis camera?

4. What communication protocols did you use? The FRC manual is pretty clean on communications restrictions:

Communication between the ROBOT and the OPERATOR CONSOLE is restricted as follows:

Network Ports:
TCP 1180: This port is typically used for camera data from the cRIO to the Driver Station (DS) when the camera is connected to port 2 on the 8-slot cRIO (P/N: cRIO-FRC). This port is bidirectional.
TCP 1735: SmartDashboard, bidirectional
UDP 1130: Dashboard-to-ROBOT control data, directional
UDP 1140: ROBOT-to-Dashboard status data, directional
HTTP 80: Camera connected via switch on the ROBOT, bidirectional
HTTP 443: Camera connected via switch on the ROBOT, bidirectional


Teams may use these ports as they wish if they do not employ them as outlined above (i.e. TCP 1180 can be used to pass data back and forth between the ROBOT and the DS if the Team chooses not to use the camera on port 2).

Bandwidth: no more than 7 Mbits/second.

Is one of these protocols best for sending images and raw data (like numerical and string results of image processing) ?