Rounding up the unusual suspects
This chapter's demo applications are tested with three cameras, which are described in the following table. The demos are also compatible with many additional cameras; we will discuss compatibility later as part of each demo's detailed description. The three chosen cameras differ greatly in terms of price and features but each one can do things that an ordinary webcam cannot!
|
Name |
Price |
Purposes |
Modes |
Optics |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Sony PlayStation Eye |
$10 |
Passive, color imaging in visible light |
640x480 @ 60 FPS 320x240 @ 187 FPS |
FOV: 75 degrees or 56 degrees (two zoom settings) |
|
ASUS Xtion PRO Live |
$230 |
Passive, color imaging in visible light Active, monochrome imaging in NIR light Depth estimation |
Color or NIR: 1280x1024 @ 60 FPS Depth: 640x480 @ 30 FPS |
FOV: 70 degrees |
|
PGR Grasshopper 3 GS3-U3-23S6M-C |
$1000 |
Passive, monochrome imaging in visible light |
1920x1200 @ 162 FPS |
C-mount lens (not included) |
Note
For examples of lenses that we can use with the GS3-U3-23S6M-C camera, refer to the Shopping for glass section, later in this chapter.
We will try to push these cameras to the limits of their capabilities. Using multiple libraries, we will write applications to access unusual capture modes and to process frames so rapidly that the input remains the bottleneck. To borrow a term from the automobile designers who made 1950s muscle cars, we might say that we want to "supercharge" our systems; we want to supply them with specialized or excess input to see what they can do!
