Computer Vision Applications and Linux? 16
blackcoot asks: "I'm about to start work on a summer project with my advisor, part of which involves getting a lab set up for real time (or as close as we can get) computer vision applications. Currently, the only machines in the lab with digital video cameras attached to them are Win2k boxen, and that's only because we haven't been able to find reasonable drivers for the firewire cameras that we have. My advisor and I would much rather *not* write our own driver for these cameras; right now my advisor has the budget for a couple reasonably inexpensive cameras. This leads me to a couple questions: are there firewire (or equivalently high bandwidth bus) based digital video cameras (not framegrabbbers) out there that have reasonably solid Linux or Video4Linux drivers; have any Slashdot readers tried to build a vision type application under Linux (something that does more processing than Xaw TV); Am I setting myself up for a whole world of pain trying to make this happen under Linux, or is it doable? Any words of wisdom? Your help is much appreciated."
Linux? (Score:1, Flamebait)
Wise man say: If you need two fish and already have one, do not throw the one you have back to fish in unknown waters.
Ask me in about three months (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm with the SAE Walking Machine Challenge team at the University of Utah, and part of the goals for this upcoming year is to incorporate a vision system with rudimentary object recognition into the existing walking machine platform as part of bringing the machine to full autonomy.
I've utilized RT-Linux on an onboard 'normal' PC as the control platform, and have no intentions of changing it. Unfortunately, I cannot be of much real help at the moment, since I'm at the same stage as the article submitter. But if anyone is interested in details about the system, I may be of help in the future.
one word, Mac (Score:1)
Use Mac OS X and get UNIX for free.
It would cost you about $900 US for an eMac. About $700-$800 for an older iMac And about $1300 for a new flat screen iMac.
Also you get codecs that you can use that are stable.
Did you look in the kernel sources? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why not use a solid framegrabber like the Osprey? Do you have some super high res progressive scan cameras or something? Most vision research is done on prerecorded video so I'm assuming your doing some real-time tracking. If this is a short 2-4 month project and you need the firewire cameras sticking with the working Windows setup might be the answer. If it's longer there is at least one good book on writing linux drivers (there are pointers in the kernel Docs.)
Look At iRobot (Score:2, Informative)
Now, as far as actually writing the code for real-time vision... that's up to you - good luck - it is a difficult problem.
Re:Look At iRobot (Score:1)
Re:Look At iRobot (Score:1)
Depends on what kind of camera (Score:3, Informative)
If you're talking about consumer-grade video camcords (aka MiniDV), you'll use the dv1394 interface and corresponding kernel modules, plus libdv [one of my projects] to decode the images (on a fast enough machine, about 700MHz PIII pegged still).
I haven't heard of any other types of firewire cameras, so if you have something that doesn't fit into one of these two categories, you got shafted IMO.
Depending on your processing requirements as far as data-flow, you may want to look at GStreamer, another of my projects, to plug together the DV device interface, DV decoder if necessary, and your processing components.
All of these are found on sourceforge under the names given, putting that many URLs into the comment when I'm this awake would be bad
Re:Depends on what kind of camera (Score:3, Informative)
This site has a lot more info on linux and firewire:
http://linux1394.sourceforge.net/hcl.php [sourceforge.net]
p.s. it actuallys work.
Write the driver (Score:1)
check out intel library (Score:1, Informative)
by the way, intel IPL library does support linux.
it's a pretty cool library (written in assembly for optimization purpose). So you can expect a lot of optimization.
Also, openCV, open source computer vision, which is built on top of IPL is also available.
What's your application? (Score:3, Insightful)
Xvision (Score:2, Informative)
Hrm... a URL... Ah, here:
Xvision2 [jhu.edu] page.