Autofocus on a Pi – ArduCam's new 16MP camera

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/autofocus-on-pi-arducams-new-16mp-camera

by geerlingguy • 5 years ago

82 31 5 years ago

canbus3• 5 years ago

Quite easy to read the MCU text with the autofocus camera, with the others not so much.

One of the few times a resolution increase does dramatically increase the clarity—probably due to the camera module also having a much nicer lens to match the higher-resolution sensor.

It also helps that the sensor is slightly larger (though still a bit smaller than the one on the HQ camera.

canbus3• 5 years ago

I think that opens up a discussion about sensor size not being the biggest factor in image quality and whether it's worth it or not in practical terms to have a large sensor. Personally I have found that my full-frame DSLR gets a lot less use than my phone with a sensor size that is a fraction of the DSLRs! Yes, artsy bokeh shots/low light photos (although this is subjective due to recent developments with smartphones) are easier to take with a larger sensor, but I almost feel like they're going obselete now at least for every-day use.

geerlingguy7• 5 years ago

I also wanted to highlight a discussion about this camera from two weeks ago, from user lemariva: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29727231 (has some other interesting details).

johndough• 5 years ago

Are there any affordable development platforms for those cameras right now? Paying 100 € for a second hand Raspberry Pi and another 25 € for the Camera seems like a bad idea when I could get a USB GPIO adapter and a smartphone with a better camera and touchscreen for less.

geerlingguy7• 5 years ago

Raspberry Pis (at least Pi 4 model B) can be found new at list price in a few places, but you have to be patient.

Of the 8 or so Pis I currently test on, the average time from when I placed the order to when I got the Pi was about 3 months (the CM4s I bought took about 8 months).

But I did get them all at list price, plus a small shipping fee.

maicro2• 5 years ago

Do you have any specific links of suppliers you recommend checking? All of my common ones, including my local MicroCenter, are almost perpetually out...

boromi• 5 years ago

What does a usb gpio adapter do with a smartphone?

jokethrowaway• 5 years ago

Nice!

In an ideal world getting a random android phone camera component and getting the appropriate linux driver should be easy but I guess not enough people are interested in doing that.

danbr• 5 years ago

Always wondered why you upload yt videos in the morning (in US). From my limited experience it appears the “algorithm” seems to favor videos released in the (early) evenings.

There are probably some stats out there on release time/viewership, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is an optimal release time (“its 5’oclock somewhere…”)

geerlingguy7• 5 years ago

Every channel's a little different—I might get more initial views if released later in the day, but it seems like YouTube's algorithm is biased more towards how the clickthrough rate and watch percentage go, then it gives another pass at a new audience on day two and sees if it changes—if it does, you can get a significant boost on the 2nd day (or I've seen up to a few days later, for a good video).

The basic answer is more, "it's complicated"—but for me it's more convenient to release in the morning so I can check in on comments early on (sometimes I get some new ideas or re-test based on early comments for things I missed!).

mips_avatar2• 5 years ago

I think this will unlock a lot of University robotics/computer vision projects. The existing options for doing embedded computer vision were pretty terrible.

forgotmyoldacc• 5 years ago

I believe most modern smartphones have more powerful cameras than ArduCam. They're more expensive, but broken / older smartphones can be had for cheap.

NikolaeVarius• 5 years ago

I highly doubt any smartphone cam worth a damn and actually interface properly with the CSI bus lanes on a RasPi.

mips_avatar2• 5 years ago

There's been about 5 years now, where the common refrain is to just use a smartphone camera. And in some cases people are literally writing an app and strapping a cellphone to a drone, but it's not ideal. This arducam camera is the closest thing to an embedded cellphone camera that is actually usable in robotics.

dekhn• 5 years ago

I;m not sure but I'd expect autofocus doesn't work well with computer vision. Most of the lenses and sensors I've worked with in raspi land have various image aberations (spherical, color). They are very different from the computer vision cameras I have.

throwaway81523• 5 years ago

This is great. I don't care at all about the 16 megapixels (to misquote Bill Gates, 6.4 megapixels should be enough for anyone), but AF and reasonable close focusing have been available in cheap smart phones but missing from the Pi til now. There hasn't even been a usable way to read a QR code with a Pi until now. The $25 price is great too.

The Pi foundation should have shipped something like this long ago. Maybe they can work out something with Arducam to make it a standard Pi product.

unnouinceput• 5 years ago

You forget: "And also if the chain supply problems will make them available enough".

Currently there is a shortage of RPi's, they take long to ship, costs more and somehow also have a lower quality compared to the older RPi's I have.

actually_a_dog• 5 years ago

While it is non-intuitive that the camera doesn't focus on a center point, the good news here is that it should be possible to control the AF motor in a more fine grained manner. I'm guessing it would take some firmware hacking, but I don't see any technical reason why it wouldn't work.

geerlingguy7• 5 years ago

True. I hope someone with more knowledge will work on some algorithms for this camera that are reasonably fast and can do contrast detect in a given region, or based on face recognition.

abdullahkhalids• 5 years ago

Does anyone know what is the closest object that this camera can focus? Can it focus on something 1 inch away from the camera lens?

Autofocus on a Pi – ArduCam's new 16MP camera

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