Andy Li's Blog

Sony PS3Eye is probably the best web cam for CV stuff: not expensive, cross platform, high frame rate(up to 120fps), no image compression etc. I’ve been using it in the past year and my experience is great.

In my final year project, I have been exploring stereo camera, ie. using multiple cameras at the same time. It is not too difficult, just place the cameras side-by-side in the same plane, with OpenCV you can calibrate them and compute a disparity map to get the depth info of the capture subject. What it means is you can do 3D tracking and probably 3D gesturing like Project Natal. And yes, I use PS3Eyes.

4 PS3Eyes combined with their original parts (Front view).

4 PS3Eyes combined with their original parts (Rear view).

I was using Ubuntu and OpenFrameworks for the project and everything is fine. You do not need to install a driver for using PS3Eye, however, to get extra controls, I used a patched driver. But the driver is less stable and sometimes it outputs corrupted frames.

I have a bit more time these few days, so I try move back to Windows and port the code to use haXe/C++ with Code Laboratories‘s CLEye SDK. I created a simple binding to the SDK and the result is pretty good. I have again put the code to github (hxCLEye), and there is a sample program(Main.hx), which use the not-yet-released nme2. It still needs to be optimized for the Bytes=>BitmapData conversion, but it is quite stable I think.

Sony PS3Eye is probably the best web cam for CV stuff: not expensive, cross platform, high frame rate(up to 120fps), no image compression etc. I've been using it in the past year and my experience is great. In my final year project, I have been exploring stereo camera, ie. using multiple cameras at the same time. It is not too difficult, just place the cameras side-by-side in the same plane, with OpenCV you can calibrate them and compute a disparity map to get the depth info of the capture subject. What it means is you can do 3D tracking and probably 3D gesturing like Project Natal. And yes, I use PS3Eyes. [caption id="" align="alignleft" width="315" caption="4 PS3Eyes combined with their original parts (Front view)."][/caption] [caption id="" align="alignleft" width="315" caption="4 PS3Eyes combined with their original parts (Rear view)."][/caption] I was using Ubuntu and OpenFrameworks for the project and everything is fine. You do not need to install a driver for using PS3Eye, however, to get extra controls, I used a patched driver. But the driver is less stable and sometimes it outputs corrupted frames. I have a bit more time these few days, so I try move back to Windows and port the code to use haXe/C++ with Code Laboratories's CLEye SDK. I created a simple binding to the SDK and the result is pretty good. I have again put the code to github (hxCLEye), and there is a sample program(Main.hx), which use the not-yet-released nme2. It still needs to be optimized for the Bytes=>BitmapData conversion, but it is quite stable I think.