Keep camera target while moving its position - graphics

Currently I'm evaluating texture caching and utilize two cameras. Each camera has of course a position, a target and an up vector.
Camera #1 has a position of [72.1, 77.5, 73] and target [71.5, 77.9, 72.4]. The up vectors is uniform for both [0, 1, 0]
To see if how well caching is working, I need to spawn the 2nd camera at the same position and translate its position, but also need to adapt the target to still keep looking at the same world coordinate point.
How can I calculate the target vector using the position translation?

Related

Camera transformation, how to distinguish object in the front and the back?

I have a camera transformation matrix K * Rt where K is the intrinsic and Rt is extrinsic, which maps a 4-dimensional homogeneous coordinate X to pixel coordinate on the image Y.
Y = K*Rt*X
This works fine and it does map the real-world points to my image. However, for some reason, it is also mapping some points that should not be inside the image into the image, so I wonder if these points are from the back of the camera.
So my question is, where will the point from the back of the camera be mapped to if we apply this transformation to them? And if it will also be mapped to the image within the same pixel, how can we distinguish if it's from the back or front of the camera?
Think what is "Rt*X". Then
how can we distinguish if it's from the back or front of the camera?
is obvious.
where will the point from the back of the camera be mapped to if we apply this transformation to them?
is obvious too.
Just confirm (calculate K*Xc, where Xc is the "back of the camera" position) by yourself if needed.

Dynamic Camera Caliberation OpenCV python3

I am planning on making a robotic arm. I have a camera mounted on the arm. I am using Opencv with python3 to do IP.
I want the arm to detect the point on the ground and the servos to move accordingly. I have completed the part of detection and calculating the world coordinates. Also, the inverse kinematics that is required.
The problem here is that I have calibrated the camera for a certain height (20 cm). So, the correct world coordinates are received at the height of 20 cm only. I want the camera to keep correcting the reading at every 2s that it moves towards the ground (downward).
Is there a way that I can do the calibration dynamically, and give dynamic coordinates to my arm? I don't know if this is the right approach. If there is another method to do this, please help.
I am assuming you are using the undistort function to first undistort the image and then using the rotational vector(rcvt) and translational vector(tvct) along with distortCoeffs to get the world coordinates. The correct coordinates are only obtained at that specific height because the rvct and tvct will change according to the square size (of the chess-board) used for calibration.
A smart way to overcome this would be to eliminate the rotational vector and translational vector easily.
Since the camera calibration constants remain the same at any height/rotation, it can be used in this. Also, rather than calibrating it every 2 seconds (which would consume too much CPU), directly use the method below to get the values!
Let's say (img_x, img_y) is the image coordinate which you need to transform to world coordinate (world_x, world_y) and cameraMatrix is your camera matrix. For this method, you need to know the distance_cam, that is, the perpendicular distance of your object from the camera.
Using python, and opencv, use the following code :
import numpy as np
from numpy.linalg import inv
img_x, img_y = 20, 30 # your image coordinates go here
world_coord = np.array([[img_x], [img_y], [1]]) # create a 3x1 matrix
world_coord = inv(cameraMatrix) * world_coord # use formula cameraMatrix^(-1)*coordinates
world_coord = world_coord * distance_cam
world_x = world_coord[0][0]
world_y = world_coord[1][1]
print(world_x, world_y)
At first, we may not realise that the units in the world coordinates don't matter. After multiplying by the inverse of the camera matrix you have defined the ratio x/z which is unitless. So, you can choose the distance_cam in any unit and the end result would be in the units of distance_cam, that is, if distance_cam was in mm, then world_x, world_y would also be in mm.

How do I find the world coordinates of a pixel on the image plane?

A bit of background
I am writing a simple ray tracer in C++. I have most of the core complete but don't understand how to retrieve the world coordinate of a pixel on the image plane. I need this location so that I can cast the ray into the world.
Currently I have a Camera with a position(aka my perspective reference point), a direction (vector) which is not normalized. The directions length signifies the center of the image plane and which way the camera is facing.
There are other values associated with the camera but they should not be relevant.
My image coordinates will range from -1 to 1 and the perspective(focal length), will change based on the distance of the direction associated with the camera.
What I need help with
I need to go from pixel coordinates (say [0, 256] in an image 256 pixels on each side) to my world coordinates.
I will also want to program this so that no matter where the camera is placed and where it is directed, that I can find the pixel in the world coordinates. (Currently the camera will almost always be centered at the origin and will look down the negative z axis. I would like to program this with the future changes in mind.) It is also important to know if this code should be pushed down into my threaded code as well. Otherwise it will be calculated by the main thread and then the ray will be used in the threaded code.
(source: in.tum.de)
I did not make this image and it is only there to give an idea of what I need.
Please leave comments if you need any additional info. Otherwise I would like a simple theory/code example of what to do.
Basically you have to do the inverse process of V * MVP which transforms the point to unit cube dimensions. Look at the following urls for programming help
http://nehe.gamedev.net/article/using_gluunproject/16013/ https://sites.google.com/site/vamsikrishnav/gluunproject

How do I access the 2D points rendered by direct3D?

This is my first direct3d program. I'm not even aware of keywords to search for. I have set up a simple 3D world and a camera. I need to get hold of the actual pixel coordinates rendered for a given camera position. I also need to know which 3D points, the points in screen-space map to.
As of now, my code calls:
device.DrawIndexedPrimitives(PrimitiveType.TriangleList, 0, 0, vertexBuffer.VertexCount, 0, indexBuffer.IndexCount / 3);
and this call is a blackbox to me. My problem would be solved, if this call would just return a list of 2D points in screen space that correspond to the vertices that I'm passing to it.
If there is no way of doing what I'm looking for, what is the closest thing to this that I can get?
For each vertex you are rendering, you can apply it with the world, view and projection matrix to get the protective points on the screen. By the way, why do you need the screen points?

How to map points in a 3D-plane into screen plane

I have given an assignment of to project a object in 3D space into a 2D plane using simple graphics in C. The question is that a cube is placed in fixed 3D space and there is camera which is placed in a position whose co-ordinates are x,y,z and the camera is looking at the origin i.e. 0,0,0. Now we have to project the cube vertex into the camera plane.
I am proceeding with the following steps
Step 1: I find the equation of the plane aX+bY+cZ+d=0 which is perpendicular to the line drawn from the camera position to the origin.
Step 2: I find the projection of each vertex of the cube to the plane which is obtained in the above step.
Now I want to map those vertex position which i got by projection in step 2 in the plane aX+bY+cZ+d=0 into my screen plane.
thanks,
I don't think that by letting the z co-ordinate equals zero will lead me to the actual mapping. So any help to figure out this.
You can do that in two simple steps:
Translate the cube's coordinates to the camera's system (using
rotation), such that the camera's own coordinates in that system are x=y=z=0 and the cube's translated z's are > 0.
Project the translated cube's coordinates onto a 2d plain by dividing its x's and y's by their respective z's (you may need to apply a constant scaling factor here for the coordinates to be reasonable for the screen, e.g. not too small and within +/-half the screen's height in pixels). This will create the perspective effect. You can now draw pixels using these divided x's and y's on the screen assuming x=y=0 is the center of it.
This is pretty much how it is done in 3d games. If you use cube vertex coordinates, then you get projections of its sides onto the screen. You may then solid-fill the resultant 2d shapes or texture-map them. But for that you'll have to first figure out which sides are not obscured by others (unless, of course, you use a technique called z-buffering). You don't need that for a simple wire-frame demo, though, just draw straight lines between the projected vertices.

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