I know the Arduino isn't powerful enough to process images from a webcam, but I was wondering if there is any possible way to take images from the webcam onto a computer and send the information to the arduino.. I'm new to this stuff and I have a project that has limited supplies for school. I want to create a device that uses a webcam and servo to detect objects that pop-up and align the webcam in the center of the objects that pop up in random places. Is there any way of doing this? Thanks guys.
RoboRealm has built-in image processing, VB scripting, and a serial port module that can output variables from your script. Tell the image processing pipeline to outline the object's area (use image differencing, aka compare frames looking for different pixels), store the center of that area into a variable with the script, have the serial port output that variable to your arduino, arduino tells servo to move, done
Damn it, RoboRealm used to be free software... now it costs $90
but they'll give it to you for free if you post your project on the internet
I did some webcam face tracking for my masters thesis. OpenCV ( http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/ ) is one of the best libraries for grabbing stuff from video and processing it. It can do many things including tracking objects and outputting coordinates for tracked objects.
It will interface with C++ and has various wrappers to let you use other languages including processing.
Oh, and it's free and open source!
Ok, great. Thanks guys. I have also been told that OpenCV is great for this as well. I'm not quite sure how it works, but I'm sure I can figure it out. I'll check out both though just to see which will be easier for me.
If you need any guidance on getting the images from the web cam into OpenCV I could dig out some old code that I used (if you're using windows that is) if you're interested
Definitely.. Programming is definitely not my strong point. Apparently I won't be using the webcam for the project due to some constraints. For now I'm just going to fix some sensors (laser diodes or something) on the servo or gun and the targets.. And have targets randomly pop-up while the servo continuously moves and once the diodes line up it sets off the trigger on the gun. But after the project I would like to add a webcam and do something like I previously mentioned, so I wouldn't mind a little aid in that area if possible. Thanks again.
I guess this article might be interesting for you: http://mechomaniac.com/node/72