For the vision projects that I’m getting ready to do, I’ll need video streams. There are several ways to get video, but one of the most inexpensive is a webcam. Webcams have been around long enough that support for them is pretty much considered de rigueur. They’re also cheap enough that there seem to be a zillion of them. I just grabbed one off of Amazon, a Microsoft LifeCam Studio. Here’s the video:
This cam has a couple of issues. It has the usual “webcam color” issues, there appears to be splotches of odd colors on some of the object edges.There was a band at the top of the video, I need to investigate further to see if it’s the camera or the program that I was using to display the video (Cheese Webcam Booth).
On the other side, skin tones look pretty good. I also liked the clarity of the up close shots, as it’s able to focus on objects just a few inches from the lens. Autofocus is available, but it doesn’t seem very fast. All in all, not bad. But it’s not outstanding, especially when compared to the quality of video that’s coming out of smartphones now.
6 Responses
have you been able to develop with it?
couldn’t get any image outside of cheese.
You should be able to use it with any GStreamer compatible code.
I’ve tried a Microsoft Cinema webcam on my TX2 and see ~1fps on Cheese. Do you see better frame rates using GStreamer. Ideally 5 to 10fps should be sufficient for my application.
Did you set the clocks to maximum?
Hi Jim, I was using Cheese as a simple test of a webcam. I did try cranking up the clocks but it made no appreciable difference. I’m running L4T 3.2. I have now tried a Python script which uses OpenCV to capture a frame from /dev/video1 (the webcam). This runs very well and I am now in a happy state. Thank you for the advice. Neil.
I am glad you got it to work to your satisfaction. Thanks for reading!