This week, I work with Breyden to integrate Grace’s filter into the pipeline, wiring up the remaining camera and mounting them onto HSMC.
One issue we ran into at first was the filter seems to have an MSB issue. We found out that it was due to the signed extended mechanism was incorrectly implemented. Instead of sign extending the MSB, the LSB was used instead. This was a quick fix and once that was fixed, the chroma keying algorithm works perfectly (some pictures are in Breyden’s blog post).
When we plug in the second camera into GPIO, we noticed there was an issue with the White Balance of the second camera seems to be much better than the first camera. However, they both were using the same settings and outputs generated from the same Arduino Uno. After mounting the third and fourth camera, we realized that the later cameras that were being mounted have a much better White Balance and auto-exposure sensitivity than the first one. We then switched this camera out for a better one and now all the cameras are generating video feeds with similar output. Since our feed back from the interim demo was focusing on the quality of the video, we realized that this might be due to the fact that the first camera seems to be defective, as shown when the video feed quality of the newly mounted cameras were much better than the first one.
To address the issue with our demo’s video quality being low because of streaming through Zoom and also partly because the demo was filmed in the dark, we are planning on using a nicer camera to film the demo and brightening up the scene of our product so that the camera can capture our product better and in a more impressive manner.
Below are images of the a comparison between the first and second camera’s White Balance issue. Note that the better camera captures the yellow hue of the room better, doesn’t make the room looks washed out. Because of this, the image quality seems more crips as compared to the other camera where the exposure and the white balance seems to be set too high.
This image shows the effect of auto-chroma keying. The details about the user-interface built for this feature can be read in Breyden’s post.
