Hi,
I'm trying to find the appropriate sensor/camera for a project of mine.
I would like to control pan and tilt of a moving head via dmx using data from face tracking.
A microcontroller such an arduino uno or mega, or an Esp32, will output the dmx data using a dmx shield or similar solutions. No problem about that. The moving head will have a camera on it (or steady at the base or moving with the head, depending on dimensions ecc) that will have to detect a face in front of it and point at it (there will not be any light out of the head).
So a simple esp32 cam, or other solutions would be ok, BUT everything will be in very problematic light context: night and day, with a lot of lights around (led, lasers, screens, ecc).
Other details:
--there will always be more then one person, not properly a crowd, but always 4 or 5 people in front (i'm planning to put a sort of filter, for focusing on one face at time for x time).
--I was thinking more about Esp32 becouse it has more ram memory then arduino - but still i think it will have too low fps for a decent smoothly movement..maybe with some filtering of the incoming data. i think there's some documentation about this.
--I'm planning to use OpenCv (or similar) for the face detection and tracking, and esp32 support phyton.
--I would also like to have a "cheap" solution for the camera/sensor, like <100€.
I'm pretty confident with kinect depth sensor, but i find no way to adapt that to this hardware. --Everything bring me to think about the use of a computer behind, but i would like to avoid this option. In that case i have still to find a solution, but maybe the kinect with appropriate drivers can work.
- So: camera would be the easyiest and cheapest solution, but is excluded due to light conditions. Excluding also all the pir, ultrasonic and laser sensors (tell me if i'm wrong, but none of them fit in my case), what i think remain are depth sensors (like kinect, but i can't find any appropriate for arduino/esp32), temperature sensors (but could be confused when too many people, maybe..) and tof sensors (i know less or nothing about those, but i couldn't find one that can handle face detection/tracking.. maybe i searched wrong?).
I read a lot of similar attempts, also here in the forum, but none with this context.
If you have any suggestions, also about other hardware like rasp pi ecc everything would be welcome. As i said, i would like to not go too far with the expenses..
Thanks