Thursday 17 November 2016

Computer Visioning - IPcam + Gstreamer adventure = new Camera

Intro

This started as an re-run of my Face Tracking project, but with updated software. New software list:
  • OpenCV v3.1
  • Gstreamer v1.8
  • V4l2loopback v0.8
  • On Ubuntu 16.04 - x64
But this proofed to be harder then the first time. Except for OpenCV, I used the default package repository. Also building OpenCV + Gstreamer 1.0 + V4l2 + Python + OpenGL, was easy enough. There is a lot of how to do this to find...

But then I had this problem:
(Sorry, the video the turned sideways. But from the 3 frames, One is falling behind. Very clearly...)

Things to try

Here is list of methods I used to read the IPcam stream in OpenCV

Gstreamer to Loopback
cv2.VideoCapture("v4l2src device='/dev/video1' ! videoconvert ! appsink sync=false max-buffers=2 drop=true name=sink emit-signals=true")
Gstreamer in OpenCV
cv2.VideoCapture("souphttpsrc location=http://192.168.50.107/videostream.cgi?user=admin&pwd=12345 do-timestamp=true is_live=true ! queue ! appsink")
Http directly in OpenCV
cv2.VideoCapture("http://192.168.50.107/videostream.asf?user=admin&pwd=12345&resolution=64&rate=0")
Then getting frustrated, this was another idea. As the default web interface had no delay, I tried to capture this browser frame and sending that to loopback with Gstreamer:
ximagesrc use-damage=false xid=0x3a00689 ! ffmpegcolorspace ! videoscale ! v4l2sink device='dev/video1'
+
cv2.VideoCapture(1)
But this also resulted in IOctrl failure...
Here are some v4l2loopback issue that seemed related: #97 - #93 - #83
This is the script I used for testing, this I compared to the IPcam interface.
Code Snip

Solution

So Finally I concluded that the (cheap) IPcam would not work. But I did wanted to keep the pan/tilt freedom. I could rip everything out, replace the camera and the board with an Arduino like this.
Back
Front
But my choice was to keep the original hardware, so I can POST web requests for the pan/tilt movement, upgrade the camera with the PlayStation 3 Eye, which has some impressive quality!
Main Board
Motor Wiring
The Head Taken Apart
Replaced the Camera

The PlayStation 3 Eye also has an microphone array, giving a nice extra. 





If you want to do the same, I can not stress enough to pay a lot of attention to the order of how the camera is put to gether!! As some part are to small to fit the USB port I was forced to cut the PS-Eye wire....But forgot the ring that holds the base and head together, so I had to take it all apart again!

The Result