CMUcam3: An Open Programmable Embedded Vision Sensor

In this paper we present CMUcam3, a low-cost, open source, embedded computer vision platform. The CMUcam3 is the third generation of the CMUcam system and is designed to provide a flexible and easy to use open source development environment along with a more powerful hardware platform. The goal of the system is to provide simple vision capabilities to small embedded systems in the form of an intelligent sensor that is supported by an open source community. The hardware platform consists of a color CMOS camera, a frame buffer, a low cost 32-bit ARM7TDMI microcontroller, and an MMC memory card slot. The CMUcam3 also includes 4 servo ports, enabling one to create entire, working robots using the CMUcam3 board as the only requisite robot processor. Custom C code can be developed using an optimized GNU toolchain and executables can be flashed onto the board using a serial port without external downloading hardware. The development platform includes a virtual camera target allowing for rapid application development exclusively on a PC. The software environment comes with numerous open source example applications and libraries including JPEG compression, frame differencing, color tracking, convolutions, histogramming, edge detection, servo control, connected component analysis, FAT file system support, and a face detector.