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What's the best camera to see games on a laptop?
SamQ from United States  [15 posts]
15 year
My project requires that I accurately (and quickly) identify game objects (including numbers and the mouse cursor) on a laptop screen.

Does anyone have any input on the most appropriate camera to use for such an endeavor?
Anonymous 15 year
I assume you cannot just record the screen directly? I.e. you do not have access to that laptop? If you do you may want to check out the

http://www.roborealm.com/help/Screen_Capture.php

module which will get a much better quality image than a camera.

Otherwise, we're not sure which camera you would use ... perhaps one with a slower refresh rate to avoid the vertical syncing of the screen.

STeven.
SamQ from United States  [15 posts] 15 year
Thank you for responding.

The whole point of having a camera "look" at a laptop screen is to enable a robot to perform game playing without any direct interaction with the laptop other than end effector movements for keyboard and mouse.
(fun!)....so screen capture directly on the laptop does not support the project goal.

Thanks.

Anonymous 15 year
Ok, just making sure as we had some confusion around the benefit of that module.

I tried a couple cameras and the best one we have seems to be the Logitech Orbit/Shpere AF as it certainly has very good optics but also allows programatic control over the focus and zoom which you can use to get reasonable images. I didn't think it would be so difficult to get a nice image from an LCD screen (never tried this before) and it does appear to be quite a challenge.

Attached below is a sample of a *very* small portion of the screen but with enough resolution that one could perhaps do OCR on. Screen was about 6 inches away from the camera.

The second one is the same image but slightly out of focus ... this helps to eliminate the grid like response from the CCD's of the LCD's but at a loss of detail.

If anyone else has better results please post the images here!

STeven.


SamQ from United States  [15 posts] 15 year
Wow STeven!

I can't begin to thank you enough for your additional input on the LCD image problem. It's really super helpful.
SamQ from United States  [15 posts] 15 year
Is there a specific reason why you elected to "see" such a small portion of the screen? Would seeing the whole screen overload speed or space requirements?
Anonymous 15 year
Sam,

Yes, I was trying to get large enough text such that you could potentially run an OCR on it ... not that you wanted to do this but I figured that it would illustrate that this is possible. If the entire screen is captured then most of the text is way too small (probably the mouse too) considering that most webcams just do not have the resolution to capture such a large image with such high resolution. But this will depend on what you are trying to do as you could resize the screen to a lower resolution to help a little if capturing the entire screen.

STeven.

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