Streaming Video to PC in HD 60 fps

Question

I am working on my final project in Software Engineering B.Sc. Our project includes tracking a ball in Foosball game. Actually with the size of the Foosball table I will need at least HD 1080p format (1920x1080 pixels) camera and because of the high speed I will also need 60 fps.

I will use OpenCV opensource to write code in C/C++ and detect a ball on each received frame.

So here is my issue: I need to get steam from the HD camera with 60fps, Wide-angled.

I can't use a web-cam because it will not give me HD format with 60fps (webcams can't do this, even expensive Logitech or Microsoft while it is written on the package - actually they mean that it can be low resolution with 60 fps OR HD with 30 fps) Also it is not wide-angled.

On the other hand I would like to use a web camera because it is easy to get stream out of it.

The preferred solution is to use extreme camera (something like Go Pro but cheaper version - I have AEE S70 - about 120$) I can use HDMI output of this camera to stream data to PC. But I can't use USB, it will be recognized as a Mass Storage Device. It has micro HDMI output but I have no HDMI Input on my PC.

The question is if it is possible to find some cheap capture device (HDMI->USB3.0/PCI Express) which can stream frames as HD 1080p and 60fps from this extreme camera to PC via HDMI? What device should I use? Maybe you suggest me another camera/or better solution?

Thanks

Answer 1

I've been looking into this for a sport application (Kinovea). It is virtually impossible to find 1080p @ 60fps due to the limits of USB 2.0 bandwidth. Actually even for lower bandwidth the camera needs to perform compression on-board.

The closest camera I found is the ELP-USBFHD01M, it's from a Chinese manufacturer and can do 720p @ 60fps on the MJPEG stream. I've written a full review in the following blog post.

The nice thing about this camera for computer vision is that it has a removable M12 lens, so you can use a wide angle if you want. They sell various versions of the board with pre-mounted lenses of 140°, 180°, etc.

MJPEG format means that you'll have to decompress on the fly if you want to process each image though.

Other solutions we have explored were USB 3.0 cameras but as you mention they aren't cheap and for me the fact that they don't do on-board compression was a drawback for fast recording to disk.

Another option I haven't had time to fully investigate is the HD capture cards for gamers like AVerMedia. These cards supposedly capture HD at high speed and can stream it to central memory.

Do you really need real-time processing? If you could perform the tracking on video files that you have recorded by other means you could use even 120fps files from the GoPro and get even better results.

Answer 2

Your choice of 1080p with 60 fps is good for the tracking application is good and as you said most of the web cams don't support such high resolution / frame rate combinations. Instead of going for a HDMI->USB3.0/PCI Express converter for your AEE S70 (which will increase the camera latency, cost and time for you to find a solution), you can check See3CAM_CU30 which streams 1080P60 uncompressed data over USB 3.0 off the shelf. Also it costs similar to your AEE S70.