Imaging Tools and software

1) The onboard CCD camera is tested to ensure its full functionabilty as provided in camera specifications. It is tested with a 933MHz video transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) for wireless communication. The lens size and field of view is to be measured experimentally. The picture below shows the 1/3 420L Sony 12V CCD camera used in image capturing and the video transmitter and receiver used for video signal transmission as well as the camera range and degree of view detectable by CCD Camera according to its specifications.

2) A capture device is required to convert the analog video output from the wireless video receiver to a digital format that can be used by a video encoder named DV Driver. These capture devices are available as either internal capture cards or external devices that are connected via USB. EasyCAP DC60 which runs under STK1160 driver is used to capture video up to 720x576 pixels at 25fps (PAL) and 720x480 pixels at 30fps (NTSC). It enables four analog inputs of CVBS, S-VIDEO, AUDIO Left and Right.

3) Image processing is done using Python-SimpleCV where SimpleCV is an open source framework for building computer vision applications. With it, several high-powered computer vision libraries such as OpenCV can be accessed easily which makes computer vision easy. Whereas, Python is a widely used high-level programming language which emphasizes code readability and its syntax allows programmers to express concepts in fewer lines of code. Python supports multiple programming paradigms including object-oriented, imperative and functional programming styles. It is often used as a scripting language, for example in SimpleCV for computer vision applications.