Elphel Development Blog

Long range multi-view stereo camera with 4 sensors

Four-camera stereo rig prototype is capable of measuring distances thousands times exceeding the camera baseline over wide (60 by 45 degrees) field of view. With 150 mm distance between lenses it provides ranging data at 200 meters with 10% accuracy, production units will have higher accuracy. Initial implementation uses software post-processing, but the core part of the software (tile processor) is designed as FPGA simulation and will be moved to the actual FPGA of the camera for the real time applications.

Scroll down or just hyper-jump to Scene viewer for the links to see example images and reconstructed scenes.

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3D Print Your Camera Freedom

Two weeks ago we were making photos of our first production NC393 camera to post an announcement of the new product availability. We got all the mechanical parts and most of the electronic boards (14MPix version will be available shortly) and put them together. Nice looking camera, powered by a high performance SoC (dual ARM plus FPGA), packaged in a lightweight aluminum extrusion body, providing different options for various environments – indoors, outdoors, on board of the UAV or even in the open space with no air (cooling is important when you run most of the FPGA resources at full speed). Tons of potential possibilities, but the finished camera did not seem too exciting – there are so many similar looking devices available.

An obvious reason for our dissatisfaction is that the single-sensor camera uses just one of four available sensor ports. Of course it is possible to use more of the freed FPGA resources for a single image processing, but it is not what you can use out of the box. Many of our users buy camera components and arrange them in their custom setup themselves – that does not have a single-sensor limitation and it matches our goals – make it easy to develop a custom system, or sculpture the camera to meet your ideas as stated on our web site. We would like to open the cameras to those who do not have capabilities of advanced mechanical design and manufacturing or just want to try new camera ideas immediately after receiving the product.
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NC393 camera is fit for flight

The components for 10393 and other related circuit boards for the new NC393 camera series have been ordered and contract manufacturing (CM) is ready to assemble the first batch of camera boards.

In the meantime, the extruded parts that will be made into NC393 camera body have been received at Elphel. The extrusion looks very slick with thin, 1mm walls made out of strong 6061-T6 aluminium, and weighs only 55g. The camera’s new lightweight design is suitable for use on a small aircraft. The heat frame responsible for cooling the powerful processor has also been extruded.

We are very pleased with the performance of Profile Precision Extrusions located in Phoenix, Arizona, which have delivered a very accurate product ahead of the proposed schedule. Now we can proudly engrave “Made in USA” on the camera, as now even the camera body parts are made in the United States.

Of course, we have tried to order the extrusion in China, but the intricately detailed profile is difficult to extrude and tolerances were hard to match, so when Profile Precision was recommended to us by local extrusion facilities we were happy to discover the outstanding quality this company offers.

 

 

While waiting for the extruded parts we have been playing with another new toy: the 3D printer. We have been creating prototypes of various camera models of the NC393 series. The cameras are designed and modelled in a 3D virtual environment, and can viewed and even taken apart by mouse click thanks to X3dom technology. The next step is to build actual parts on the 3D printer and physically assemble the camera prototypes, which will allow us to start using the prototypes in the physical world: finding what features are missing, and correcting and finalizing the design. For example, when the mini-panoramic NC393-4PI4 camera prototype was assembled it was clear that it needs the 4 fins (now seen on the final model) to protect the lenses from touching the surfaces as well as to provide shade from the sun. NC393-4PI4 and NC393-4PI4-IMU-GPS are small 360 degree panoramic cameras assembled with 4 fish-eye lenses especially suitable for interior panoramic applications.

The prototypes are not as slick as the actual aluminium bodies, but they give a very good example of what the actual cameras will look like.

 

 

As of today, the 10393 and other boards are in production, the prototypes are being built and tested for design functionality, and the aluminium extrusions have been received. With all this taken care of, we are now less than one month away from the NC393 being offered for sale; the first cameras will be distributed to the loyal Elphel customers who have placed and pre-paid orders several weeks ago.

More lenses tested: Evetar N123B05425W vs. Sunex DSL945D

We just tested two samples of Evetar N123B05425W lens that is very similar to Sunex DSL945D described in the previous post.

Lens Specifications

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Lens testing at Elphel

We were measuring lens performance since we’ve got involved in the optical issues of the camera design. There are several blog posts about it starting with "Elphel Eyesis camera optics and lens focus adjustment". Since then we improved methods of measuring Point Spread Function (PSF) of the lenses over the full field of view using the target pattern modified from the standard checkerboard type have better spatial frequency coverage. Now we use a large (3m x 7m) pattern for the lens testing, sensor front end (SFE) alignment, camera distortion calibration and aberration measurement/correction for Eyesis series cameras.

So far lens testing was performed for just two purposes – select the best quality lenses (we use approximately half of the lenses we receive) and to precisely adjust the sensor position and tilt to achieve the best resolution over the full field of view. It was sufficient for our purposes, but as we are now involved in the custom lens design it became more important to process the raw PSF data and convert it to lens parameters that we can compare against the simulated achieved during the lens design process. Such technology will also help us to fine-tune the new lens design requirements and optimization goals.

The starting point was the set of the PSF arrays calculated using images acquired from the the pattern while scanning over the range of distances from the lens to the sensor in small increments as illustrated on the animated GIF image Fig.1. The sensor surface was not aligned to be perpendicular to the optical axis of the lens before the measurement -each lens and even sensor chip has slight variations of the tilt and it is dealt with during processing of the data (and during the final alignment of the sensor during production, of course). The PSF measurement based on the repetitive pattern gives sub-pixel resolution (1.1μm in our case with 2.2μm Bayer mosaic pixel period – 4:1 up-sampled for red and blue in each direction), but there is a limit on the PSF width that the particular setup can handle. Too far out-of-focus and the pattern can not be reliably detected. That causes some artifacts on the animations made of the raw data, these PSF samples are filtered during further processing. In the end we are interested in lens performance when it is almost in perfect focus, so scanning too far away does not provide much of the practical value anyway.

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Open Hardware Lens for Eyesis4π camera

Elphel has embarked on a new project, somewhat different from our main field of designing digital cameras, but closely related to the camera applications and aimed to further improve image quality of Eyesis4π camera. Eyesis4π is a high resolution full-sphere panoramic and stereophotogrammetric camera. It is a tiled multi-sensor system with a single sensor’s format of 1/2.5″. The specific requirement of such system is uniform angular resolution, since there is no center in a panoramic image. (more…)

Elphel new camera calibration facility

Elphel has moved to a new calibration facility in May 2013. The new office is designed with the calibration room being it’s  most important space, expandable when needed to the size of  the whole office with the use of wide garage door.  Back wall in the new calibration room is covered with the large, 7m x 3m  pattern, illuminated with bright fluorescent lights.  The length of the room allows to position the calibration machine 7.5  meters away from the pattern. The long space and large pattern will allow to calibrate Eyesis4π positioned far enough from the pattern to be withing depth of field of its lenses focused for infinity, while still keeping wide angular size, preferred for accuracy of measurements. We already hit the precision limits using the previous, smaller pattern 2.7m x 3.0m. While the software was designed to accommodate for the pattern where each of the nodes had to have individually corrected position (from the flat uniform grid), the process assumed that the 3d coordinates of the nodes do not change between measurements. (more…)

Heptaclops camera and the 393

“Temporary diversion” that lasted for three years

Last years we were working on the multi-sensor cameras and optical parts of the cameras. It all started as a temporary diversion from the development of the model 373 cameras that we planned to use instead of our current model 353 cameras based on the discontinued Axis CPU. The problem with the 373 design was that while the prototype was assembled and successfully tested (together with two new add-on boards) I did not like the bandwidth between the FPGA and the CPU – even as I used as many connection channels between them as possible. So while the Texas Instruments DaVinci processor was a significant upgrade to the camera CPU power, the camera design did not seem to me as being able to stay current for the next 3-5 years and being able to accommodate new emerging (not yet available) sensors with increased resolution and frame rate. This is why we decided to put that design on hold being ready to start the production if our the number of our stored Axis CPU would fall dangerously low. Meanwhile wait for the better CPU/FPGA integration options to appear and focus on the development of the other parts of the system that are really important. Now that wait for the processor is nearly over and it seems to be just in time – we still have enough stock to be able to provide NC353 cameras until the replacement will be ready. I’ll get to this later in the post, and first tell where did we get during these 3 years. (more…)

Building and Calibrating Eyesis4π

This is a long overdue post describing our work on the Eyesis4π camera, an attempt to catch up with the developments of the last half of a year. The design of the camera started a year before that and I described the planned changes from the previous model in Eyesis4πi post. Oleg wrote about the assembly progress and since that post we did not post any updates. (more…)

The last chance to see us at SIGGRAPH’12

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