Best Cameras for Computer Vision

[Justin Buist]

Originally Posted by Adnewhouse

Our team is rather fond of the Playstation Eye camera that use to be an accessory for the PS3. It costs less than ten dollars and does 60fps at 480p (also 120fps at 320p, but we've never tried that). This is pretty ideal for vision tracking. The image sensor has ridiculously large photosites, so there is very little image noise to worry about. The only downside is that they don't work on Windows systems very well without a third party driver. On the raspberry pi, it works just fine with OpenCV. You can get them on ebay because they are not made any more.

It also doesn't work with the roboRio, at least not out of the box. We've tinkered with them a bit this year. The most promising thing, to me, about them is that you can pull the IR filter out and replace it with Mylar (or the inside of an old floppy disk) to block most visible light but let IR through.

The pi works with the camera just fine though. Had two students "struggle" with getting it to work on their Windows and Mac machines but popped it into the pi and it was just fine. Not sure why the roboRio is crippled with only supporting the "uvcvideo" kernel module and none of the other USB webcams. I could understand it if they really nailed that one down but the Wpilib documentation and interaction with v4l2 is so bad even with that limited driver support that it's almost like they didn't try and forced people to get creative.