Give me a general direction for the camera.

[sparrowkc]

I'm getting pretty frustrated trying to track the pink and green beacon in labview. What is the best way to approach this? Which VI's should I use?

[Luke Pike]

The easiest way is to use the LabVIEW Vision Assistant. Use it with some images you have captured from the camera, it has a bunch of image proccessing stuff. Then you can create a vi from that and add it to your project. Good luck!

[Woody1458]

Im not on my team's prgramming team so I don't know specifically about this camera but I have programmed my computers webcam to follow a red ball and use it as mouse control. What I did was find all point on the image that were within certain color constrictions (r>200 b<20 g<20) then count the points, if there werent enough point the ball wasn't in image. If it counted enough point it would find the average location of the sum of points.

(sum x_loc/total locations,sum y_loc/total locations)

This worked pretty well. good luck!

[billbo911]

What we have found to be a very reliable way to track the target colors is a two step process:
1) Determine the optimized HSL numbers for the lighting conditions you are in.
2)Enter those numbers into the tracking vi. and adjust the tracking controls for good solid tracking.

Start by opening the example programs list in LV. Select the "Locate Colored Object" project. Set the project to run on your system's IP. Open the "LocateColoredObjectExample.vi". Start with the simple tab. Run the vi.
On the simple tab, select the color you want to track, red or green are the two that have the most relevance this year. Follow the directions to get it to identify the color you selected as accurately as possible. Once that is set, move to the "Color Wheel" tab and fine tune the Hue, Saturation and Luminance sliders for the best possible identification of your color. Now, go to the "HSL numbers" tab and right down the numbers for H,S and L. Close out the sample project.

Now open the "Servo Camera Example" project. Set it up for your system's IP. Set the PWM numbers for your X & Y servo's. Enter the HSL numbers for the color you want to track. Open the "Gimbel Control". Switch back to the front panel for the displays and run the project. Once you see the images on the top screen, switch to "gimbal track".

You should now see the camera lock onto the color you want and track it.
To fine tune the servo tracking, switch to the "Gimbel control" front panel and adjust the values to get the best response.

You should now be tracking with the big dogs.

[TotalChaos]

Billbo911's idea is definitely much more useful, however, I did write up a tutorial on how to separate out one color from pictures from the Axis cam, and it would be a shame not to offer it up for some use. If you're at all interested you can check it out on our team website HERE.

Good luck!

- Austin

[PhilBot]

The new tracking demo understands the flipped friend/foe color combiations so it saves a ton of programming. You may want to focus on USING the taret data for now and wait for the demo code to come out. The demo provides a "target rectangle" as it's output, not unlike the current single color version.

[billbo911]

Originally Posted by TotalChaos

Billbo911's idea is definitely much more useful, however, I did write up a tutorial on how to separate out one color from pictures from the Axis cam, and it would be a shame not to offer it up for some use. If you're at all interested you can check it out on our team website HERE.

Good luck!

- Austin

Austin,
Nice tutorial. I think it may be quite useful depending on what you are trying to achieve. May I suggest you make it a White-paper.

Originally Posted by PhilBot

The new tracking demo understands the flipped friend/foe color combiations so it saves a ton of programming. You may want to focus on USING the taret data for now and wait for the demo code to come out. The demo provides a "target rectangle" as it's output, not unlike the current single color version.

Phil,
Thanks for the heads up on this. I haven't been paying close enough attention to Bill's Blog. This new example looks quite interesting and we (Team 2073) are looking forward to it's release.

[Bomberofdoom]

Originally Posted by sparrowkc

I'm getting pretty frustrated trying to track the pink and green beacon in labview. What is the best way to approach this? Which VI's should I use?

Bill's blog: http://frcdirector.blogspot.com/2009...king-news.html

You will receive a software from FIRST to detect two colors. Try to work as suggested, with Vision Assitant so you can get familiar with it's usefullness and tricks you might need to use once the update comes. If you find it too hard, then just wait for the update.