This week I modified our cue stick subsystem to use AprilTags. This turned out to affect the accuracy both positively and negatively. It provided a positive effect in that the cue stick detection itself was more accurate and much more consistent. However, the negative part was that the large AprilTags made our other computer vision subsystems behave unexpectedly. The most detrimental was that our cue ball detection subsystem started to mistake the AprilTags themselves occasionally as cue balls. Additionally, in order for the cue stick to be detected, this now required both AprilTags to be within frame. However, for some edge-case shots near the pool table walls, this would not work. As such, we decided to revert back to the previous polygon approximation method for now, and I am working on relying more on color detection for the cue stick detection. The idea is to use some sort of very bright, unusual color as an indicator for the cue stick subsystem to pick up on (something like bright pink).
Since our schedule is currently focused on integration, I am not too much behind schedule. I caught a pretty bad case of food poisoning Tuesday night and could not do much work until the weekend. However, I’m using the time now to catch up as well as work on newer tasks. In the coming week, I will be looking into integrating ball spin from our web application input into our physics engine + backend.
For verification, the most important component/subsystem I need to verify and improve is the cue stick detection system. The tests I’m planning to run for this subsystem is fairly straightforward: they consist of various frames/video taking various shots as well as lining up a variety of different shots. Verifying the subsystem is not difficult – I look frame-by-frame, output the detected cue stick, and verify it visually. To verify these results, I also added unit tests to the subsystem verifying smaller functional components required to make the entire subsystem operate successfully. This was also repeated for parts of the calibration subsystem as well.