This past week our team met twice in Hammerschlag to work on our design. Our goal for this week was to finalize our positional tracking design and test it. We have had decent success with tracking the infrared LED via the Raspberry Pi NoIR camera. However, there is still an issue of background light being detected as false positives. Our code greyscales the image from the NoIR camera and masks it to filter anything below a certain threshold, because the infrared light is essentially a perfect white as RGB. One unexpected issue is that the Raspberry Pi NoIR camera does allow infrared light, however it converts it to RGB and does not expose an infrared channel. Beyond working on the project, I also started the ethics assignment and read through the first of the assigned articles. I thought the examples provided were very interesting and expanded my perspective on the political aspects of technology.
We are on schedule and have made no changes to it as of now.
Next week we will need to improve our positional tracking and specifically solve the issue of false positives in the form of background light. This is partially due to the NoIR camera not providing an infrared channel. If it exposed an infrared channel we would likely have better success tracking the infrared LED. Solving this challenge will be our next goal, and we have a few ideas to accomplish it. One solution is that the LED can blink at a high frequency, and in this way we can differentiate it from background light. There are also background subtraction filters available in OpenCV, which may help alleviate the background light issue.