Project Tango Camera Specifications

2
votes

I've been developing a virtual camera app for depth cameras and I'm extremely interested in the Tango project. I have several questions regarding the cameras on board. I can't seem to find these specs anywhere in the developer section or forums, so I understand completely if these cant be answered publicly. I thought I would ask regardless and see if the current device is suitable for my app.

  • Are the depth and color images from the rgb/ir camera captured simultaneously?
  • What frame rates is the rgb/ir capable of? e.g. 30, 25, 24? And at what resolutions?
  • Does the motion tracking camera run in sync with the rgb/ir camera? If not what frame rate (or refresh rate) does the motion tracking camera run at? Also if they do not run on the same clock does the API expose a relative or an absolute time stamp for both cameras?
  • What manual controls (if any) are exposed for the color camera? Frame rate, gain, exposure time, white balance?
  • If the color camera is fully automatic, does it automatically drop its frame rate in low light situations?

Thank you so much for your time!

Edit: Im specifically referring to the new tablet.

1
google-project-tango

1 Answers

2
votes

Some guessing

No, the actual image used to generate the point cloud is not the droid you want - I put up a picture on Google+ that shows what you get when you get one of the images that has the IR pattern used to calculate depth (an aside - it looks suspiciously like a Serpinski curve to me

Image frame rate is considerably higher than point cloud frame rate, but seems variable - probably a function of the load that Tango imposes

Motion tracking, i.e. pose, is captured at a rate roughly 3x the pose cloud rate

Timestamps are done with the most fascinating double precision number - in prior releases there was definitely artifacts/data in the lsb's of the double - I do a getposeattime (callbacks used for ADF localization) when I pick up a cloud, so supposedly I've got a pose aligned with the cloud - images have very low timestamp correspondance with pose and cloud data - it's very important to note that the 3 tango streams (pose,image,cloud) all return timestamps

Don't know about camera controls yet - still wedging OpenCV into the cloud services :-) Low light will be interesting - anecdotal data indicates that Tango has a wider visual spectrum than we do, which makes me wonder if fiddling with the camera at the point of capture to change image quality, e.g. dropping the frame rate, might not cause Tango problems