Computer Vision Help

[giodamelio]

We are a team of two 14 year high schoolers looking to create a robot with computer vision.

I was wondering what some good software is(Keep in mind that our budget is very small).

We have a web cam, a arduino, a laptop computer to use. We also have enough hardware to build the robot itself.

[blackbeard]

We are a team of two 14 year high schoolers looking to create a robot with computer vision.

I was wondering what some good software is(Keep in mind that our budget is very small).

We have a web cam, a arduino, a laptop computer to use. We also have enough hardware to build the robot itself.

by computer vision do you mean object recognition through a camera or just adding sensors so that it can follow lines or not bump into things? or are you just trying to stream video from a moving robotic platform? just about anything you want to do with a web cam will require that you use that laptop onboard the the robot platform as the arduino is neither powerfull enough nor is it designed for use with a usb webcam. object recognition is going to be even harder but there is software out there and i have seen it done in the past though usually with a stationary computer that tells the difference between a cube and a ball so assuming the software exists in the capacity you're looking for it would still be verry difficult to make your robot actually get usefull data that it can make decisions based on. if you want to stream video and sound then that's SUPER easy and can be done with both msn and skype. if you plan to go this rought then you can develop sketches on the arduino to communicate with your laptop through serial using a Visual basic program or varios other programing softwares as well. this makes your arduino basicly like an I/O board for your laptop and is very easy. if your laptop has a parralel port then it can do all this whithout an arduino! if you just want to detect obsticles then you should look into IR sensors which can detect distance and even color in some configurations (for tasks such as line following). for this you would only need the arduino.

[giodamelio]

I have a electric wheelchair that i have managed to control with the arduino

is there a way to use a computer to find obstacles and avoid them.
maybe a program that can use a serial connection to the arduino to control the robot

[giodamelio]

if you just want to detect obsticles then you should look into IR sensors which can detect distance and even color in some configurations (for tasks such as line following). for this you would only need the arduino.

One of the main points of this project is to use computer vision

[Razor Concepts]

You can use Python to do the video processing (and a webcam on the computer) and then send the data through serial to the Arduino.

[giodamelio]

I am not very good with python.

Is there any advise you could give me.
or any examples you could give me

[Razor Concepts]

Are you good with anything else (on the computer)? If not, python is probably the easiest to learn.

Also tons of people use python so there are lots of video processing example code floating around

[giodamelio]

well i have been programming in vb.net for 3 years and i believe i am intermediate

[Razor Concepts]

Hmm, computer vision is too complicated to do in basic. There is some computer vision stuff in Visual C/C++ so you may want to check that out, the C code is very similar to the structure Arduino uses.

[giodamelio]

Is there any library's you would suggest for a beginner?

[parallax]

OpenCV is a open source computer vision library created by Intel several years back for the C/C++ programming languages. It has a little bit of a learning curve but in general is relatively easy to use. Plus, because it is open source and has been around for so long, there are a ton of resources and documentation surrounding it. Its available for windows and linux, and has wrappers available for a few other languages (including python and java) as well. Here is a link to their wiki:

http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/

You can download the libraries and sources there as well. 
 

[Razor Concepts]

OpenCV is a open source computer vision library created by Intel several years back for the C/C++ programming languages. It has a little bit of a learning curve but in general is relatively easy to use. Plus, because it is open source and has been around for so long, there are a ton of resources and documentation surrounding it. Its available for windows and linux, and has wrappers available for a few other languages (including python and java) as well. Here is a link to their wiki:

http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/

You can download the libraries and sources there as well. 
 

AWESOME I never knew it was for java also! Finally my years of stupid java pay off.

[giodamelio]

opencv look really cool but when i install it, it wont do anything
i try it in vc++, and python

python just says the is no module named cv

i have no clue what to do 

thanks

[parallax]

OpenCV is a open source computer vision library created by Intel several years back for the C/C++ programming languages. It has a little bit of a learning curve but in general is relatively easy to use. Plus, because it is open source and has been around for so long, there are a ton of resources and documentation surrounding it. Its available for windows and linux, and has wrappers available for a few other languages (including python and java) as well. Here is a link to their wiki:

http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/

You can download the libraries and sources there as well. 
 

AWESOME I never knew it was for java also! Finally my years of stupid java pay off.

LOL I was excited when I found that out too! 

opencv look really cool but when i install it, it wont do anything
i try it in vc++, and python

python just says the is no module named cv

i have no clue what to do 

thanks

Here is a page specific to using OpenCV and Python:
http://opencv.willowgarage.com/documentation/python/introduction.html

In terms of Python: I don't know a thing about Python but there is a ton of resources out there. For specific questions that people can't answer here, check out the OpenCV forums. There is a really active online community, and I'm sure you can get help with it there. Also, a google search for "python opencv" reveals a ton of web pages, including step by step lessons. Stick with it and I think you will find OpenCV is a fantastic tool.

In terms of VC++: Are you adding the correct include folders to your project? Have you linked to the correct libraries? Is the OpenCV directory included in you PATH?

Here is a sight of tutorials which will tell you how to install and use OpenCV with VC++
http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/VisualC%2B%2B

Keep at it- it threw me off for awhile at first as well but I finally figured it out

[klims]

RoboRealm might work for you. It is a gui based image processing program. Little to no programming required.
I went on to their website and noticed they have started to charge for the software. It used to be free for private use.
Not sure how it goes with licensing, but maybe you could get it for free if you can find an old version?