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Sunday, December 8, 2013

Build a $15 Serial Camera - OpenMV The Camera For Your Next Project - by low tech

Here's a great Serial Camera Project. That show how he build his Serial Camera, for less than $15. It's very well Documented. So, spend some time on this site and you may learn allot. I know, I did. See the info and videos, below...

Don

by low tech:

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

In Search of a Better Serial Camera Module

So I've been looking everywhere for a cheap serial camera to use in my projects, preferably with some basic image processing, like object or motion detection etc.. The cheapest one I could find that barely meets my needs is sold on adafruit for $35, it has a 640x480 pixels sensor and can do some motion detection but nothing more. Then there is the more expensive modules which cost around $40 that do nothing at all and finally there's the CMUcam, which has some really nice features, but way too big and expensive (costs $100) for my needs...

So I decided to make my own serial camera, keeping in mind the basic set of features that I want:
  • Low cost
  • Small form
  • Basic image processing
  • Open source (duh!)
First, I had to choose an image sensor to use, I was inclined to use the TCM8230MD, which I'm familiar with, however, the sensor alone costs $10 and I can't seem to find it any where else other than sparkfun. So, I've decided to try the Omnivision sensors, the cheapest one I could find is the OV9650 (1280x1024 pixels) sold on ebay for $2... The nice thing about this sensors is that it connects to the board with an FPC cable (that flexible yellow cable), which means it's possible to replace it later with another one (assuming it has the same pinout) and it also has a higher resolution than the TCM8230MD. The downside with this particular sensor is that it doesn't have JPEG compression, but I could live with RGB/RAW output, after all I plan to use it mainly for image processing, or I could try to implement the JPEG compression on the micro.

Moving on to the microcontroller, a powerful micro is needed to interface with this sensor, preferably with a DCMI hardware interface, I implemented a DCMI before in software with an LPC1768/TCM8230MD and it could barely keep up, so I decided to go with something faster. 

Fortunately, I had a couple of STM32F4 micros laying around, which seemed perfect for the job since it  runs at 168MHz, has a hardware DCMI (should make it a lot easier to interface the camera) and as an added bonus, it has a floating point unit and vector processing (SIMD), making it perfect for image processing... Unfortunately, the DCMI only comes with the LQFP-100 package, so I couldn't use a smaller one. 

I started working on the PCB, first, I made a footprint for the sensor and its connector, which seems to fit nicely:
And then I moved to the layout,

Read More...
http://sigalrm.blogspot.com/2013/07/in-search-of-better-serial-camera-module.html

Thursday, December 5, 2013

OpenMV Update: 25FPS Face Detection, USB Support and More

So I've been working on OpenMV for the past week and this is what I have so far:

USB Support:
The camera now supports USB OTG full speed, I've also written a small userspace tool with libusb/SDL to interface with the camera and view the frame buffer, this makes it really easy to debug the image processing code, and it also lets you change the sensor's registers while watching the results in realtime.


I've mentioned building the STM32F4xx libraries in a previous post, you can checkout the repo linked there if you want to build the libraries.

Face Detection:
Many were very interested in this feature, well I've managed to get the viola-jones face detector working on the camera, and it's working fine.. For those of you familiar with the detector, the haar cascade is exported as a C header which is linked to the binary and loaded into the CCM (Core Coupled Memory) a 64KB memory block connected directly to the core. Only one integral image is pre-computed and allocated on the heap, the other one, the squared integral image, which is used for computing the standard deviation, can't fit into memory for the QQVGA resoultion, and so, instead, the standard deviation is computed on the fly for every detection scale using some SIMD instructions to speed it up a bit.

Read More...
http://sigalrm.blogspot.com/2013/12/openmv-update-25fps-face-detection-usb.html



Realtime Color Tracking With OpenMV (30FPS)

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2 comments:

  1. UnknownDecember 11, 2013 at 4:30 AM

    Hey... I want to try ur camera proyect. Where can I get the steps to track a color? I need it for my final proyect to track a moving object of a specific color with a Quadcopter.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Don's Deals BlogDecember 21, 2013 at 6:57 PM

    Hey Oscar, check out the links in the Post, for more info. This is not my Project. I just found it and wanted to share it...

    Don

    ReplyDelete