30fps Vision Tracking on the RoboRIO without Coprocessor

[Jaci]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

First, pretty awesome write up. Running on board removes a lot of risk associated with reliance on vision processing. The communication step is hard.

Second, I'd be curious how you derived the requirement of 640x480. It seems to me that using a lower resolution image would process faster and the quickest win in this whole process would be to compute what the min image resolution required would be.

I've attached some of the test images 125 produced that I've down sampled as an example if folks want to play with it. They were taken at 14 feet away dead straight on and then scaled using imagemagick to 1280x960 -> 80x60. While the 80x60 image is just silly I do believe there are applications where much lower resolutions are just as effective.

It also opens the possibility of using low res images for identifying ROI and then processing just the smaller region in the higher resolutions.

Honestly I used 640x480 as a kind of 'boast' as to how much potential this can hold (that, and it's also the default resolution of a Kinect camera @ 30fps). You can actually downscale this image entirely using the VFP, by using vld1.64 to load into the D registers, and a variation of vst to shift back out to memory, interleaved, discarding the extras, or saving them for later use as you proposed in your last paragraph. This is 'effectively' zero cost to the entire algorithm, as it does it 128 bits at a time.