Turn a Cheap Webcam Into a Depth Camera
Depth cameras are useful for everything from robots and navigation systems to computer vision projects, but they are typically pretty expensive. For this reason, they are not often used in hobbyist projects. But there is another approach, as was recently demonstrated by Depth Multitool. This device uses an ordinary USB webcam and an AI model running on the Arduino VENTUNO Q to estimate the distance to everything in view at 20 frames per second. There is no stereo camera, infrared projector, or LiDAR sensor involved.
Created by Samuel Alexander, the project runs Depth Anything V2 Small directly on the VENTUNO Q's Qualcomm Dragonwing NPU. The 25-million-parameter neural network performs monocular depth estimation, meaning it looks at a single conventional camera image and predicts the relative distance of every pixel. The result is essentially a depth camera, only it is built almost entirely in software.
Heatmap mode (📷: Samuel Alexander)
Alexander...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to www.hackster.io. To see the full text click HERE
