Vision: what's state of the art in FRC?

[controls weenie]

Originally Posted by Caboose

Team 900 this year is currently working with a nVidia Tegra TK1(Quad ARM Cortex-A15 with Kepler GPU with 192 CUDA cores, <$200) to tackle vision processing. So far we are seeing good results with high FPS(>40) with large image resolutions(720p) doing just filtering at the moment all on the GPU with OpenCV. We are working on tracking next.

That's great that you are learning the nVidia Tegra TK1. I would like to know more about your experiences with this device. Will you post some example code? Are you using C++ or python?

We used the PCDuino last year and we downloaded code from Billbo911's (above) website. His code is written in python and very easy for the kids to understand. It worked very well last year. We tracked balls, reflective tape and bumper reflectors. We will probably use the PCDuino and Bill's code again this year.

We used a USB web cam but had do down sample to 480x320 to maintain 30Hz with our image processing output. OpenCV and python work very well but you have to be careful because python loops can slow you down.

One thing that I did not see mentioned in this thread is how to enhance the reflective tape image. We used white ring lights last year which is very WRONG! There is so much ambient white light that we had a terrible problem tracking the reflective tape. I recommend using 3 green ring lights. Then pre filter only green pixels. You can buy small diameter, medium and large. The small fits in the medium and the medium fits in the large.