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A system was developed that is able to track the ball, draw a red
cross at the ball's estimated position on the video monitor,
and hit the ball.
This project is turned out to be tightly constrained by the timing
of the video
frame grabber (vertical retrace interrupt). Therefore it ended up with
essentially a single periodic task.
Some possible improvements are:
- A variable resolution algorithm might be used to improve the
timing. It could change the zoom factor from 8 to 1 by zooming to
the region where the ball is expected. In other words, it would start with
a low resolution, but finally read the pixels with high resolution
only in the small area where the ball is supposed to be.
It would start to read pixels with 8 to 1 zoom, and if it finds
the ball, then it would change the zoom to be 4 and read pixels from a
quarter of the frame, find the ball again, and change the zoom to be 2
and so on.
- A digital filtering algorithm might solve some of the noise
problem.
- Use of a faster bus and processor would allow this system to
have more time to execute the tracking algorithm.
The faster bus would speed up reading the pixels, which is currently
taking most of the
period, and the faster processor would allow doing more other processing.
Finally, if there were time for more complicated processing, this
might allow putting several
balls on the table at once, predicting bounces, and planning shots
to optimize trajectory.
Ted &
Wed Feb 5 10:50:20 EST 1997