Week of 11/12

Another week gone by...

This week was rather so-so as far as progress.  Last Thursday, Grady and I started configuring our machines.  This took a significant amount of time, but we now have 3 machines (2 Windows, 1 Ubuntu) to work with.

Tuesday, I also researched the undistort/z-component and determined we should undistort (since it uses 2D) and then create a homogeneous coordinate from the idealized coordinate.  Speaking with Dr. Wolff, he still wondered about what the undistort function did with the z-component.  So Thursday, I took the example calibration code, used the pictures provided, got the intrinsic and distortion parameters, and then plotted out the distorted and undistorted points.  It took quite some time, especially with the example code in C.  I tried to convert things to the more recent C++ openCV elements, but I ended up sticking with C (the new version of the OpenCV book comes out in December; hopefully it includes updated example code we can use).

Below is the comparison of the distorted points with the undistorted (in ideal camera coordinates).  They seem to look pretty good and I think we can go ahead and proceed using the procedure described above. (thus the z-component must be assumed to be 1).
Note: the image used is 1600x1200 and the scaling between the two is off.

On Tuesday, I also was able to use just the red component of the laser (rather than the intensity level) and the data did show a spike.  I tried in a light room as well and didn't get very good results.  More testing in a light room with better camera settings will likely occur later.  But the dark room will produce the most stark results.

Grady is still chuggin' away with the circuits, communicating with the company.  He seems to have gotten a little more of a grasp and hopefully is close to a breakthrough.

Tyler researched some on the opencv video settings.  He hasn't been able to meet recently on our normal days, so hopefully he is available more as we approach the end of the semester.

We have a design presentation coming too quickly and will likely need to turn more of our focus towards that.

UPDATE:

Here are the mappings of the corners to the distorted and undistorted images of a chessboard:

Distorted image

Undistorted