I am working on a senior project to create an outline of an image and create a line drawing of that outline with a plotter. My question is, what's the best sensor to use to create this outline? I've researched a number of different kinds of sensors including infrared, ultrasonic, and imaging, but I'm not finding anything that's jumping out at me as the obvious choice.
I want to 'image' the lenses of a pair of glasses, but if necessary I could work with the outline of the frame around the lenses instead. I want the simplest sensor output that will give me the outline so that translating the outline to plotter input (i.e. x/y drawing coordinates) will be reasonably simple (though not necessarily "easy").
Is a color camera the simplest sensor that will give me this or can I get away with an IR or ultrasonic sensor instead?
How about using a camera or scanner in b/w mode , converting to a format you can manipulate (bmp?) and use software to determine the position of the outline.
I'm probably going to be stuck with conversion via the Mega no matter what but I'm hoping that there will be one kind of sensor that will make conversion easier. The next question will be how to go about the conversion process but I'll leave that for another thread if I can't figure it out.
I forgot to add that I'm trying to do this without connecting to a PC. I want a standalone device when all is said and done.
I'm hoping to find something nice and cheap (college student cheap!) but it looks like I'm out of luck. I don't have the time or current know-how to muck around with a camera that I can't connect directly to the Arduino either, so I may be stuck having to shell out for something like the the ArduEye Aphid Vision Sensor ($80) or possibly the RadioShack Color Camera Board ($45). Either way it'll be a fair amount of work to process the image into what I need...
Maybe I can do something simpler. What if I flashed/shined lights from behind the lenses and used a light intensity sensor to figure out the shape and size of the lenses? Can those sensors be used in this way or would I have to pass the light back and forth behind the lenses to get the necessary information?
It looks like I've (re-)discovered my solution, the HacroCam Camera + Shield (which I had bookmarked a while back and forgotten about, D'OH!). The price is just right and the built-in camera doesn't do anything I don't need it to. Included on the site is their method of creating "line drawings" (a.k.a. automatic image edge detection), along with a very nice Arduino Motor Shield + Wiring Tutorial!
