Automatic license/number plate recognition (ALPR / ANPR) is a specialized kind of optical character (OCR). Target applications might include automatic car parking control, electronic toll collection, neighborhood watch, vehicle tracking and such. Concerns about these systems have centered on privacy fears of government tracking citizens’ movements. Critics have described it as a form of mass […]
Read MoreKurokesu C1 camera firmware upgrade
Good news everyone! Friends from Sonix made custom firmware for Kurokesu C1 camera. Now camera has wider manual white balance adjustment range (9300K instead of 6500K). Also frame rate is now flexible and camera can adapt to lower light automatically. Unfortunately camera firmware can’t be upgraded remotely, if you have purchased camera before this date […]
Read MoreUnusual tasks with video files – reading bar-codes and qr-codes
A barcode is an optical, machine-readable, representation of data; the data usually describes something about the object that carries the barcode – wikipedia. While first barcode was patented on 1952, it took quite a while until these codes were used in first grocery store on 1974. And now they are being used everywhere. While using […]
Read MoreUnusual tasks with images – stacking pictures
Stacking images always has been a favorite topic for astro or timelapse photographers. In most cases computational photography opens complete new dimension to taking pictures and acquiring awesome results. There are countless commercial software packages with some advantages or limitations. My mind about simple tasks has always been on DIY side – I think it […]
Read MoreAny CS-mount camera deserves autofocus!
I have been working on open-sourced motorized zoom lens for a while. Probably there is no need to mention benefits of having motorized zoom/focus lens on a regular CS type camera. Even greater value comes by having auto-focus capability. This feature is being calculated on host computer and does not consume lot of resources. Many […]
Read MoreExploring and displaying USB video with GraphEdit
GraphEdit is a little known tool distributed with Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) and allows exploring camera settings and video rendering filters. A copy of old version (which worked just fine without installing whole SDK) can be found wildly on the internet. Besides ability of tinkering with options it is much more advanced tool […]
Read MoreDIY PCB inspection microscope
Despite how good microscope you have, stand is still very important part of final assembly. And while there are many commercial ones made of cast iron, they might cost more than a microscope head itself. I decided to make stand from wildly available material laying around – it’s MDF (Medium Density Fiberboard). Advantages – stable […]
Read MoreOpenCV USB camera widget in PyQT
Both tools OpenCV and PyQT are incredibly useful. One in combination with Qt Designer gives rapid GUI building possibility. Another is used for visual image/video analysis. There was one drawback – very little documentation how to use them into one piece of code. All in the past now! To be short – sample program I […]
Read MoreOpenCV 3 Python blur detection
In order to detect if picture is in focus modern consumer cameras use complicated phase detection circuitry and specialized sensors. But how to determine if captured picture is in focus after it has been taken. Having this measurement information can help in many ways (select best picture in a sequence, control motorized lens, clean time-lapse […]
Read MoreAdvanced OpenCV 3 python hole detection
OpenCV is a well known computer vision library used as base framework used by major companies like Google, IBM, Sony and numerous others. It enables quick vision based tool development and results can be seen in a minutes after starting to code. This time I will show how to find round blobs (for example fiducial […]
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