Programmable cameras C# for vehicle system

Question

Hi folks ! I recently joined a project where I need to get some vehicle based computer vision system. So what sort of special functionalities does a camera need, to be able to capture images while traveling at varying speeds ? for example how high a frame rate is required, and the exposure duration, shutter speed? Do you think that webcams(even if high end) will be able to achieve it ? The project requires the camera to be programmable in C# ... Thank you very much in advance!

Answer 1

I'm not sure that's an answerable question. It sounds like the sort of thing that the Darpa Grand Challenge hopes to determine :)

With regard to frame rate: If you're vehicle is going 30 miles per hour, a 30 FPS web cam will capture one frame for every 44 centimeters the vehicle travels. Whether or not that's "enough" depends on what you're planning to do with the image.

Answer 2

Unless video is capable of producing high quality low blur images, I would go with a camera with really fast shutterspeed, very short exposure duration, and for frame rate, following Seth's math, 44 centimeters is roughly a little more than a foot, which should be decent for calculations.

Reaction time for a human to respond to someone hitting the breaks in front of them is 1.5 seconds. If you can determine they hit their break light within 1/30th of a second, and it takes you 1 second to calculate and apply breaks, you already beat a human in reaction time.

How fast your shutter speed needs to be, is based on how fast you're vehicle is moving. Shutter speed reduces motion blur for a more accurate picture to analyze.

Try different speeds (if you can get a camera with this value configurable, might help).

Answer 3

Not sure about the out-of-the-box C# programability, but a specific web-cam style camera to consider would be the PS3 eye.

It was specially engineered for motion-capture and (as I understand it) is capable of higher-quality images a high framerates than the majority of the competition. Windows drivers are available for it, and that opens the door for creating a C# wrapper.

Here is the product page, note the 120fps upper-end spec (not sure that the Windows drivers run at this rate, but obviously the hardware is capable of it).

One Note on shutter speed... images taken at a high framerate in low-light will likely be underexposed and unusable. If you'll need this to work in varying light conditions then the framerate will likely either need to be fixed at the low-end of your acceptable range, or will need to self-adjust based on available light.

Answer 4

My iPhone can take pictures out the side of a car that are fairly blur free... past 10-20 feet. Inside of that, things are simply moving too fast; the shutter speed would need to be higher to not blur that.

Start with a middle-of-the-road webcamera, and move up as necessary? A laptop and a ride in your car while capturing still images would probably give you an idea of how well it works.

Answer 5

These guys: Mobileye - develop such commercial systems for lane departure warnings and vehicle and pedestrian detection. If you go to the "Manufacturer Products->Development and Evaluation Platforms->Cameras" You can see what they use as cameras and also for their processing platforms. 30 fps should be sufficient for the applications mentioned above.

Answer 6

If money isn't an issue, take a look at cameras from companies like Opeton and others. You can control every aspect of every image capture including: capture time, image size, ++.