Programmable cameras C# for vehicle system

I recently joined a project where I need to get some vehicle based computer vision system. So what sort of special functionalities does开发者_运维百科 a camera need, to be able to capture images while traveling at varying speeds ? for example how high a frame rate is required, and the exposure duration, shutter speed? Do you think that webcams(even if high end) will be able to achieve it ? The project requires the camera to be programmable in C# ... Thank you very much in advance!

Unless video is capable of producing high quality low blur images, I would go with a camera with really fast shutterspeed, very short exposure duration, and for frame rate, following Seth's math, 44 centimeters is roughly a little more than a foot, which should be decent for calculations.

Reaction time for a human to respond to someone hitting the breaks in front of them is 1.5 seconds. If you can determine they hit their break light within 1/30th of a second, and it takes you 1 second to calculate and apply breaks, you already beat a human in reaction time.

How fast your shutter speed needs to be, is based on how fast you're vehicle is moving. Shutter speed reduces motion blur for a more accurate picture to analyze.

Try different speeds (if you can get a camera with this value configurable, might help).

I'm not sure that's an answerable question. It sounds like the sort of thing that the Darpa Grand Challenge hopes to determine :)

With regard to frame rate: If you're vehicle is going 30 miles per hour, a 30 FPS web cam will capture one frame for every 44 centimeters the vehicle travels. Whether or not that's "enough" depends on what you're planning to do with the image.

Not sure about the out-of-the-box C# programability, but a specific web-cam style camera to consider would be the PS3 eye.

It was specially engineered for motion-capture and (as I understand it) is capable of higher-quality images a high framerates than the majority of the competition. Windows drivers are available for it, and that opens the door for creating a C# wrapper.

Here is the product page, note the 120fps upper-end spec (not sure that the Windows drivers run at this rate, but obviously the hardware is capable of it).

One Note on shutter speed... images taken at a high framerate in low-light will likely be underexposed and unusable. If you'll need this to work in varying light conditions then the framerate will likely either need to be fixed at the low-end of your acceptable range, or will need to self-adjust based on available light.

These guys: Mobileye - develop such commercial systems for lane departure warnings and vehicle and pedestrian detection. If you go to the "Manufacturer Products->Development and Evaluation Platforms->Cameras" You can see what they use as cameras and also for their processing platforms. 30 fps should be sufficient for the applications mentioned above.

If money isn't an issue, take a look at cameras from companies like Opeton and others. You can control every aspect of every image capture including: capture time, image size, ++.

My iPhone can take pictures out the side of a car that are fairly blur free... past 10-20 feet. Inside of that, things are simply moving too fast; the shutter speed would need to be higher to not blur that.

Start with a middle-of-the-road webcamera, and move up as necessary? A laptop and a ride in your car while capturing still images would probably give you an idea of how well it works.