Machine Vision - The Beginning

"A picture is worth a thousand words" is not just an idiom, any complex idea can be easily conveyed with just a single still image. Machine vision is the current trending area towards which many companies are focussing today. So from now on, embeddedunderoneroof is going to post a series of posts under Image Processing. Get ready to go into the digital image world :)

First things first, inorder to do some complex image processing tasks starting everything from scratch is a dream which may come true. Lets stick onto practical, there are several libraries dedicatedly focussing on image processing is available. Here comes a few in the list

Image processing libraries:

• Matlab

• OpenCV
• AForge
• Magick++
• CImg

Each library has its own pros and cons. In the upcoming series of posts, we are going to use OpenCV library since it is being available open source for both commercial and non-commercial use. So now we have got a library to do the image processing tasks.. Where are we going to run all this?? A PC with sufficient memory and processing power is enough. The OS is users choice, our choice would be the Windows. Dont worry OpenCV has supports in major OS's choose whichever OS you are comfortable with.

OpenCV supported OS:

• Windows
• Linux
• Mac
• iOS
• Android

Download Link: http://opencv.org/downloads.html

Once you have chosen an OS use the download link mentioned above and download the latest OpenCV version for your OS and wait for our next post in this series.

How to Capture “Friendly Name” from a Camera

Hi, Today am back with a mindblowing,method to tell you how you can capture or get a Friendly name of a camera.

What is a Friendly Name??

Any devices, will have some kind of ID for identification, some of them are

Device ID:

Vendor ID: etc...

Since all these are numbers, it is hard to be remembered by the user, so therefore a short name to recognize the type of camera , is called the friendly name.

Ex:USB 2.0

Things Required:

1.Visual Studio

2.Platform SDK

3.A Camera

So lets get started,into our journey of capturing Friendly names of a camera

STEP 1:

Install,the platform SDK,properly.You can have a look into my previous chapters where I would have discussed that.

STEP 2:

Open Visual Studio 2005, and then open a new Win32 Project,hope you are familiar with building Win32 Apps.For those who are not, dont worry, in a week or so I will post tutorials on win32 programming

STEP 3:

Just make a simple dialog box with an button,add a list box for viewing the enumerated Device. Just see the screen shot  below.

                                

STEP 4:

This is a crucial step as I am going do  a brief explanation of some of the concepts. I have commented my program ,to an extend where you can easily understand.

Here We are going to use a concept called COM(Component Object Model) which is a binary interface standard for software modules. It’s an interface between two program modules, one of them is an OS or a library.

System Device Enumerator

It returns a collection of device Monikers, selected by a device category.It enumerates Filters and hardware installed on the system.

Monikers

It contains information that uniquely identifies a component object model.

There is two important properties of it

1. Can be saved and later retrieved.

2. Support an operation called binding, which is a process of locating object named by a Moniker, activating and loading it, if it is not already active.

Iproperty Bag

This is a kind of variable ,or you can assume it as a bag as the name suggests, from which we can read the values. The Imonikers saves the object properties on it.

  Just see the program ,try building it and running it and then explore your own ideas with it.

If all step is  properly done then you can see an  window , as shown below

And here we come to the end of this tutorial ,hope you liked it.

Author

Vivek Gr

Embedded Project Engineeer