Anyhow, I should hopefully have the CIIMage stuff all worky by the end of the week. (maybe sooner if I am lucky)

Cheers!
-b

But if you are fixing this anyway, I can wait. I need to get back to wiring my led’s so I’ll have plenty to do while I wait for the changes.

Thanks for the help!

I knew this would happen at some point :-) in fact your blobs do need to be white (at the moment). Invert is one of the reasons that I am adding CIImage support (although invert is super duper easy to do, right in the blob detector)

I dont think you can invert your camera input :-) so i will need to change the code real quick so that you can invert the way the detector compares the values. (it is probably about a three line change)

I am about a day or two away from the CIImage update as a transport between the camera and the blob detector (making things like inversion REALLY simple)

if you don’t want to wait (i know I never do :-) you should be able to get it working with a quick code change: (after having a quick refresh on the code)

two changes: both in BBBlobDetector.m

line 314 ish, in the -(BOOL)validBlobPixel:(int)position method
change this line:
if ((srcBytes[position] – bgBytes[position]) > threshold)
to read:
if (abs(srcBytes[position] – bgBytes[position]) > threshold)

line 225ish in the -(void)scanSrcDataWithROI method
change this line:
if ((srcBytes[loopXYDataPosition] – bgBytes[loopXYDataPosition]) <= threshold)
to read:
if (abs(srcBytes[loopXYDataPosition] – bgBytes[loopXYDataPosition]) <= threshold)

I THINK that will work :-) I am not actually at the machine with all my code and tests and stuff, so i cant test it out. later today I will be able to et back into it, but if you are as impatient as I am when you are so close, this might just hold you over until i get a better (ie CIImage/CIFilter) solution in place :-)

cheers!
-b

That means my blobs are coming out black, but yours are white, does that matter? I also have brightness set high and contrast set high, which gives me some nice dark blobs.

However, they are not recognized as blobs consistently. I’m not sure how to adjust the blob detection settings because I’m not sure what it’s doing. If I can just get past this step I think I can really help out more, with more testing and documentation.

I know there are a lot of developers working on mac solutions, but for my money bbtouch looks the most promising and I’d really like to help it along anyway I can.

I have the fire-i and the settings i use that work well are:
Compression type: component video – ccir – 601 uyvy
frames per second: best (which is about 30)

I have also used uncompressed 8 bit as well, didnt seem to make much of a difference in the end. I dont even know what the compressor is even doing (if anything at all)

and in the image adjustments i set the brightness and exposure to manual and then adjust those two plus gain to get a nice looking image.

cheers!
-b

yepp – you are right with the preferences. deleting the pref file lets you access the camera settings… The Fire-I make a bit of trouble tough… There are very little video setting you can pass thru BBTouch. Uncompressed video does not working. 60fps also not. B/W not etc… I am getting also the stylish pop-art videos in some setting you mentioned in your post :-) I guess that is the video-grabber as you are saying. BUT (and a BIG BUT): the blob detection works NICELY! I could test that only with a remote control (our table is not finished yet), but i recognises the blobs well and you can pass the TUIO stuff nicely to the Flash demos ;-)

About QC: sorry! Stuped me! I even did not realise that the QC-TUIO-Patch only allows fiducials. And you are right – it is a good option to have the blob recognition and tracking also in QC. I had some ideas, but i need some time to line them out… Will post the ideas sometimes later to you (you know allways the boring clients with they payed jobs – LOL). But i stubled over some efforts going that way. Take a look at http://kineme.net/ and do a search for TUIO and OSC – those guys are also working in feature recognition inside QC…

Keep it up you Kung-Fu-Panda!! :-)

Sandor

Cheers!
-b

errors are good! (i mean, ther arent good, but finding them is good, so don’t feel bad about posting errors :-)

There is definitely something a bit flakey about the way I am storing and retrieving the camera settings. I am trying to figure out the issue. One temporary solution that I have had is to find the BBtouch preferences file (com.bb.bbtouch.plist i think it is called) and trash it (while the app is not running) then re-open the app and see how that goes.

I had some issues with the same kind of thing (not crashing, but strange errors with the sequence grabber showing either no video, or a strange squished and tiled version of the video) Especially across versions of BBTouch. So, trash your prefs and let me know how it goes, and I will get stuck into the byzantine sequence grabber code and see if i can sort out the source of the problem.

But, to reference what I said earlier: bring on the bugs! I cant fix them if you guys dont tell me about them, so don’t be shy. Also, the crash reports (like screamingdrills posted above) are very helpful.

Cheers!
-b