Decoupling the image acquisition from the Image Processing

[Ziaholic]

Thanks Greg. I really enjoyed reading that. It answered an unasked question I've had for the past month or so ... regarding the way the data from the camera was moved around.

To the OP ... if you want to get rid of the circles and lines on the dashboard, then poke around in the Dashboard.VI and remove some of the stuff in there.

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by Ziaholic

Thanks Greg. I really enjoyed reading that. It answered an unasked question I've had for the past month or so ... regarding the way the data from the camera was moved around.

To the OP ... if you want to get rid of the circles and lines on the dashboard, then poke around in the Dashboard.VI and remove some of the stuff in there.

Thanks - we've already done that. What I don't get are some of the teams saying they're getting 30 frames per second on their driverstation. We're getting 5 with processing turned on (320x240), 10 with processing at 160x120, and 15-18 with process off at 160x120.

I don't know how they're managing that extra frame rate and it will be (in my eyes) a huge advantage to be able to aim with the camera in real-time for long shots.

[Ziaholic]

I've read the 30 fps threads and to be honest, I'm a skeptic. I'll have to see it to believe it. In my opinion, 4-5 fps is perfectly adequate to be able to manually (or autonomously) line up a kick-shot.

I'm of the school of thought that more/faster is not necessarily always equal to better. ... and sometimes it'll come back and bite ya'.

It's one thing to "tweak" the FPS to the max when you're alone on a tether or a private wireless LAN, but it can be an entirely different animal when you're hooked up to an FMS with 5 other 'bots.

I admire their drive to push things to the limit, but IMO, it's too risky to use it during a competition when 4-5 fps can still get the job done.

[Wei]

30 FPS at the highest image size is possible. This is what was we had to do to get those results. However, we did not run at 30 FPS (at competition) because it wasn't needed.

Changes to the C++ platform:
1 - Alter the Template Robot code
1.1 -(BIGGIE) remove continuously processing functions
1.2 - all code run in periodicFunctions (TeleOp and Auto. mode)
1.3 (BIGGIE) Use semaphores and Timer Task to control periodic function execution instead of reading the time/clock continuously to determine when the periodic functions should execute.

2 - Optimize the image processing functions to not process false positives.

3 - Configure Camera and Image processing functions/task to a lower priority

What the changes accomplish:
1.1 and 1.3 doubles the processing power available for Image processing (about 50% increase).
1.1, 1.3 combine with 3 decrease task switching cost (about 1 to 5 % processing gain, a few more percentage gains is possible if you area willing to play with the system clock).
2 - Depending on how much optimizing is done, Image processing cost can be decrease by at least 50%.