leocb / ACamOperator

Automatic camera operator

ACamOperator

The objective of this project is to point a camera at someone and by using OpenCV tracking systems, it'll automatically follow them with a pan and tilt mechanism

The intended use is for conferences, where you have to follow a person at all times, without losing the camera frame

This code would not exist without Adrian Rosebrock and his tutorial. Thank you!

Project specifics

This code is designed for the following specifications, your mileage may vary.

• This uses a EasyCap USB dongle to capture the image from a composite out of a camera
• EasyCaps are a little tricky to find a suitable driver and use within openCV, see bellow for more notes
• the output is trough a COM port, in this packet: $[horizontalSpeedByte][VerticalSpeedByte][CS]
• the speed bytes are a single char (signed), that is, 127 speeds available at either direction
• Checksum (CS) is a Xor of both bytes.

Using

1. Connect the arduino to the PC
2. Run the ACamOperator.py script
3. Press S to select the object to be tracked, then press Enter
4. everything should work
5. press Q to quit.

if the ACamOperator.py script can't open the video stream (black screen), try running the test_stream.py first to check if everything is working.

About EasyCap

• The Windows 10 driver that I use on my PC is in the Drivers folder, unzip and install.
• On openCV, use cv2.VideoCapture instead of cv2.VideoStream, and pass the CAP_DSHOW flag with it, then set the FPS. Example:

cam = cv2.VideoCapture(streamIdHere + cv2.CAP_DSHOW)
cam.set(cv2.CAP_PROP_FPS, 30)