Tracking Movement Optically And Cheaply

摘要

Many machine sensors like accelerometers and gyroscopes have fallen in price because of the popularity of smart phones. Low-cost cameras and optical sensors have also benefited from smart phones with camera sensors for photography or video conferencing. Almost a decade ago my daughter built a number of robotic science fair projects with a CMUcam that was developed at Carnegie Mellon University. It used an RGB camera. She turned that information into HSI (hue, saturation, intensity) to more readily track changes in the image. Back then the technology allowed results measured in seconds per frame. I helped turn her Java code into assembler and put it on the CMUcam, replacing CMUs code. The resolution was still low but results were available in tens of frames per second.