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Rotating the escam

A project log for Auto tracking camera

A camera that tracks a person & counts reps using *AI*.

lion-mclionheadlion mclionhead 02/03/2019 at 19:560 Comments

Rotating the Escam 45 degrees & defishing buys a lot of horizontal range, but causes it to drop lions far away.  The image has to be slightly defished to detect any of the additional edge room, which shrinks the center.

The unrotated, unprocessed version does better in the distance & worse in the edges, but covers more of the corners.  Another idea is defishing every other rotated frame, giving the best of both algorithms 50% of the time.  The problem is the pose coordinates would alternate between the 2 algorithms, making the camera oscillate.  It would have to average when the 2 algorithms were producing a match.  When it went from 1 algorithm to 2 algorithms, there would be a glitch.

In practical use, the camera is going to be in the corner of a cheap motel room, so the maximum horizontal angle is only 90 degrees, while longer distance is desirable.  The safest solution is neither rotating or defishing.

Another discovery about the Escam is if it's powered up below 5V, it ends up stuck in night vision B&W mode.  It has to be powered up at 5V to go into color mode.  From then on, it can work properly below 5V.  So the USB hub has to be powered off a battery before plugging it into the laptop.  Not sure if openpose works any better in color, but it's about getting your money's worth.

The next problem is the escam can only approximate what the DSLR sees, so there's parallax error.  There's too much error to precisely get the head in the top of frame. 

After much work to get the power supply, servo control, escam mount, & DSLR mount barely working, there was just enough data to see the next problems.  Getting smooth  motion is a huge problem.  Body parts coming in & out of view is a huge problem.  Parallax error made it aim high.

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