[Beowulf] cluster for doing real time video panoramas?

[Jim Lux]

At 04:20 PM 12/22/2005, Glen Gardner wrote:
>Be bold. Do the image processing in parallel.

Yes, but how to parallelize??  Do the projections to the sphere 1 or 2 cams 
per pc, and then "gather" the pieces of the projections?
Or, send all cams to all pcs, and do frame parallel processing. Some sync 
issues there.

A lot of interesting questions arise..

Just for grins.. 640x480x3 bytes per frame at 30fps = 27 MB/sec = 220 Mbit/sec

That's a bunch o data to be pushing around.




>It is the kind of thing that will run very fast on low end cpus
>and it won't be a difficult job to parallelize.
>
>Glen
>
>On Wed, 2005-12-21 at 12:00 -0800, Jim Lux wrote:
> > OK all you cluster fiends.. I've got a cool application (for home, sadly,
> > not for work where I'd get paid to fool with it)..
> >
> > I've got a robot on which I want to put a half dozen or so video cameras
> > (video in that they capture a stream of images, but not necessarily that
> > put out analog video..) with overlapping fields of view.  I've also got
> > some telemetry that tells me what the orientation of the robot is.  I want
> > to take the video streams and stitch them (in near real time) into a
> > spherical panorama, that I can then render from a corrected viewpoint
> > (based on orientation) to "stabilize" the image.
> >
> > So.. you can get cheap 1394 video cameras from a variety of sources.
> > There's a package of tools for doing the panoramas called panotools from
> > Helmut Dersch, which I've used successfully with still frames (but not
> > video!) that can do all the needed camera transformations and 
> resampling (I
> > think).
> >
> > But, then, how do you do the real work... should the camera recalibration
> > be done all on one processor?  Should each camera (or pair) gets its own
> > cpu, which builds that part of the overall spherical image, and hands them
> > off to yet another processor which "looks" at the appropriate part of the
> > video image and sends that to the user?
> >
> > here's an example of someone who did video panoramas on a Mac (but not in
> > real time, I suspect)
> > http://www.vrhotwires.com/InexpensivePanoramicVideo.html
> >
> > Panotools info at:
> > http://www.panotools.info/mediawiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
> >
> >
> > James Lux, P.E.
> > Spacecraft Radio Frequency Subsystems Group
> > Flight Communications Systems Section
> > Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mail Stop 161-213
> > 4800 Oak Grove Drive
> > Pasadena CA 91109
> > tel: (818)354-2075
> > fax: (818)393-6875
> >
> >
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James Lux, P.E.
Spacecraft Radio Frequency Subsystems Group
Flight Communications Systems Section
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mail Stop 161-213
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena CA 91109
tel: (818)354-2075
fax: (818)393-6875