Despite having done quite a bit of computer graphics over the years (even getting paid to do it), I haven’t really done much in the way of computer vision. I’m currently trying to work on a project for the upcoming Maker’s Faire that has something to do with computer vision (he says slyly, teasing his reader(s) mercilessly), so the first step is to try to calibrate a camera. This quantifies the distortions in the camera, and allows you to locate the camera in 3 dimensional space relative to a base coordinate system. Toward that end, I wrote a simple ellipse detector, and it works really well. On the fastest machine at my disposal, it processes this 640×480 frame (reduced here to 400×300) in about 3.5 milliseconds, and locates all of the ellipses in the scene to subpixel accuracy. Or at least, that’s the ultimate idea. But I have the feature detector working.

As I get more of the ultimate project working, i’ll post more info here, and it is my intention that eventually the entire project be available for download.

[tags]Computer Vision,Camera Calibration[/tags]