Portable Vision System

The goal of this project is to build a portable computer vision system using, as far as possible, inexpensive off-the-shelf components. A true portable vision system must have two components:

• Hardware that is physically portable, and
• Software that is portable to many hardware configurations .

Physical portability would allow the system to be used out of doors, to be taken on trips, and to control a mobile robot. Software portability would allow researchers to share code with colleagues at other sites, and to work alternately at home and at the office. Both types of portability are essential, both to allow computer vision research to proceed at a suitable pace and to make computer vision algorithms suitable for practical applications.

We hope that our eventual system will

• be under 5 pounds, including computer, camera, framegrabber, and battery packs,
• cost about $4000 for a laptop configuration, about $3000 for a compatible desktop configuration,
• allow low-level vision operations to be written succinctly, in a pleasant high-level language (probably Scheme), and
• automatically compile vision operations into efficient C code.

The Computer Science Department Home Page

Iowa Computer Vision Page

This page is maintained by Margaret Fleck. and Dan Stevenson.

Last modified