Vision Tracking Question

[David Lame]

We used vision tracking this season, but we want to port it to a Raspberry Pi and OpenCV.

I'm curious why people seem to want to use an IP camera or a USB camera with the PI. What's wrong with the Pi camera module?

I know that it has a bit of a "fish eye" issue, but that's correctable with camera calibration. From what I've read, USB cameras with the PI are significantly slower, but I haven't verified that myself, and I just read it on the internet, so take that for what it's worth

[GreyingJay]

Originally Posted by David Lame

I'm curious why people seem to want to use an IP camera or a USB camera with the PI. What's wrong with the Pi camera module?

I know that it has a bit of a "fish eye" issue, but that's correctable with camera calibration. From what I've read, USB cameras with the PI are significantly slower, but I haven't verified that myself, and I just read it on the internet, so take that for what it's worth

In retrospect, yes, we should maybe have explored this option further. The choice of hardware was dictated more by what was available to us at the time.

We mounted our IP camera on a servo-controlled pan/tilt module. The intent was that camera image would be picked up by the Pi, it would perform its image processing, and send targeting data to the RoboRio via a TCP connection. The RoboRio could then command the servos to move the camera if needed. We thought we would move the camera to stay with the target it was tracking, and/or have an override by the operator to look around.

In the end we more or less fixed the camera position and didn't end up using all the features we built into it.