Sample Trail

The image above is an overhead shot of the sample trail creating using orange electrical tape placed on black tiles. From an overhead view the contrast is very good with the squares being nicely defined against the matt black tiles.

From the robot's point of view the setup looks quite different than from an overhead view. This is largely due to the proximity of the camera to the ground and the lack of adequate lighting to provide enough contrast in the image. The bad lighting of the setup was done on purpose in order to review image processing techniques that can help in these kinds of environments.

The robot view also reveals the pattern in the black tiles that includes white marks. These are less apparent in the overhead view but provide a high level of noise in the robot view.

You may also note that the squares in the image do not appear orange but instead appear more of a yellow color. This is due to color consistency problems which cause colors to appear incorrectly due to camera intrinsics, bad/low lighting and different illumination colors, i.e. colors appear different in sunlight versus florescent lights even if well lit.

Let's have a look at a couple more images from the robot ....