Over the past week, I have continued to purchase items needed for the live studio, including additional colors of construction paper (in order to experiment with chroma-keying with different background colors), a VGA-to-HDMI converter (to connect the FPGA output to the TV), and additional OV7670 cameras (in case any get damaged during the integration process).
Throughout the week, I continued to research de-noising filters that could be implemented on an FPGA, such as a median or low-pass filter. Unfortunately, both of these filters require operating at multiple pixels at a time, which is extremely difficult alongside the memory constraint. Fortunately, as mentioned in the Team Status Report this week here, we do not need a de-noising filter because the live studio’s lighting is sufficiently bright as to render chromatic noise largely nonexistent.
In addition to finishing software implementations of chroma-keying and brightness and contrast filters, I have also written hardware descriptions (in SystemVerilog) of modules that support chroma-keying and brightness and contrast filters. Given Breyden’s suggestion about the FPGA’s hardware switches, I have designed these modules to flexibly take in different values of input.
My progress is on schedule, thanks to Jullia kindly taking over the task of constructing the live studio. Over the next week, I will fully test, debug, and synthesize implementations of chroma-key and brightness and contrast filters. I may also assist with creating a cardboard top over the pyramid that is more professional and appealing than the existing one. Aside from that, I will assist with the final testing and integration that represents our last weeks of capstone.