List of robotic vision sensors and image processing libraries

A 2D vision sensor or an ordinary camera delivers 2D image frames of the surroundings, whereas a 3D vision sensor delivers 2D image frames and an additional parameter called depth of each image point. We can find the x, y, and z distance of each point from the 3D sensor with respect to the sensor axis.

There are quite a few vision sensors available on the market. Some of the 2D and 3D vision sensors that can be used in our robot are mentioned in this chapter.

The following figure shows the latest 2D vision sensor called Pixy/CMU cam 5 (http://www.cmucam.org/), which is able to detect color objects with high speed and accuracy and can be interfaced to an Arduino board. Pixy can be used for fast object detection and the user can teach which object it needs to track. Pixy module has a CMOS sensor and NXP (http://www.nxp.com/) processor for image processing:

Pixy/CMU Cam 5

The commonly available 2D vision sensors are webcams. They contain...